Art Appreciation · Resource Library

Readings — assigned

Reading	Where it lands
John Berger, “The Eaters and the Eaten”	The anchor of the food strand. Its opening line — “To eat is to appropriate, to take into ourselves the lives of others” — heads the Food and Ethics unit. Serves U3
John Berger, Ways of Seeing, ch. 1	L10 Berger and the reproduction
Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility” (2nd version, 1936/2008)	L11 Aura and the poor image — the aura half
Hito Steyerl, “In Defense of the Poor Image”	L11 — the poor-image half. The two readings are read against each other
Susan Sontag, “In Plato’s Cave”	L12 Photography and after. This is On Photography’s first essay, extracted — the full book is on the reference shelf
Dean Kissick, “The Painted Protest” · “Hello Darkness”	Contemporary art-world criticism; fits L13 The artworld and the brief

Further reading

Reading	Note
Michael Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy	The source of “painting is a deposit of a social relationship.” Underpins the patronage strand
Francis Haskell, Patrons and Painters: Art and Society in Baroque Italy	Baroque patronage. A 25-page extract (pp. 120–145) is the teaching text; the full book is the shelf copy
Sarah Thornton, Seven Days in the Art World	Ethnography of the contemporary art world — the empirical counterpart to Danto’s philosophy at L13
Susan Sontag, On Photography (full)	The complete book; “In Plato’s Cave” is its first essay
John Berger, Portraits
The Image Object Post-Internet	Post-internet art theory; pairs with the Ulman and Horvitz videos
Documents of Contemporary Art — 16 volumes: Abstraction · Appropriation · Beauty · Documentary · Failure · Nature · Networks · Sound · Systems · The Archive · The Artist’s Joke · The Cute · The Everyday · The Sublime · Time · Utopias	The Whitechapel/MIT anthology series. A thematic shelf, not a syllabus — each volume is an edited collection of short primary texts. Use it to source one or two excerpts when your Atlas Book theme needs theory

The DOCA series is the most reusable resource here for the Atlas Book capstone: if you are working on masks and identity, or screens, or ruins, you can go to a volume rather than open search.