Art History and Visual Cultures
Art history and visual cultures is the discipline concerned with understanding the making, reception, and meaning of visual objects, images, and environments across time and across cultures. From prehistoric cave paintings to contemporary digital art, from Renaissance masterpieces to street photography, art history asks how images work, what values and beliefs they express or contest, who made them and for whom, and how they have been collected, displayed, interpreted, and argued over. Visual cultures broadens this inquiry beyond the traditional art historical canon to include film, advertising, fashion, popular imagery, and the everyday visual world.
The Open University offers this programme in part-time distance learning mode, providing access to a rich and intellectually serious engagement with art history and visual culture for students who cannot study on campus. The flexibility of distance learning makes this degree accessible to those in employment, with family responsibilities, or in locations that would otherwise make university study impossible. You will study works and movements across a wide range of periods and geographies, developing the skills of visual analysis, historical contextualisation, and critical interpretation that are at the heart of the discipline.
You will engage with the major theoretical frameworks that shape art historical inquiry, including formalism, iconography, semiotics, psychoanalytic criticism, feminist art history, and postcolonial theory, and develop your ability to construct sustained written arguments about visual material.
Graduates of art history and visual cultures programmes work in museums, galleries, auction houses, art publishing, heritage organisations, arts administration, journalism, and education. The analytical, research, and communication skills the discipline develops are highly transferable and valued in many professional contexts. Further study options include postgraduate degrees in art history, curatorial studies, cultural studies, museum studies, and visual culture, as well as professional routes in the heritage, creative, and cultural sectors.