The Arts Past And Present - AA100 - Study Companion

Some books swagger into your life with the confidence of masterpieces. Others arrive wearing a lanyard, carrying a folder, and quietly explaining the module structure. The Arts Past and Present – AA100 – Study Companion belongs firmly, and rather magnificently, to the latter category.

Written by Richard Danson Brown and published by The Open University in 2008, this is not merely a book about the arts. It is a study companion to the arts, which is a very different and very noble thing. A book about the arts may roam freely through beauty, meaning, genius and civilisation. A study companion, by contrast, must also concern itself with timetables, frameworks, interpretation, and the faint but ever-present possibility that the reader is revising under pressure with a cup of tea going cold nearby. It is art with admin. Culture with coursework. Aesthetics under supervision.

And there is something deeply charming about that. The title The Arts Past and Present is already broad enough to imply that, yes, this volume is prepared to take on quite a lot. The arts. Past and present. In other words, nearly everything human beings have made worth looking at, listening to, performing, reading or discussing. A modest undertaking, then. But the addition of AA100 – Study Companion brings the whole thing back down to earth with admirable efficiency. However grand the subject, someone still has to get through the module.

That is the quiet glory of Open University books. They are democratic, serious, practical and faintly heroic. They do not assume that learning happens only in cloistered libraries or picturesque seminar rooms full of people named Sebastian. They assume instead that real people, with jobs, responsibilities, tiredness and ordinary furniture, might still want to think about art, history, literature and culture in a structured way. There is something wonderfully decent about that mission, and books like this embody it perfectly.

So this is not a glossy coffee-table celebration of civilisation’s finest achievements. It is something better, in its own way: a guide for the determined reader trying to make sense of a vast and occasionally intimidating subject. It helps you move through the material, organise your thoughts, and probably feel slightly less alarmed by the scope of human artistic output. That is no small service. The arts, after all, can be overwhelming. Every century thinks it has something to say. Every movement invents new terminology. Every object seems to demand interpretation. A study companion stands beside all this and says, calmly, let us proceed in some kind of order.

As sold by Crappy Old Books, this copy is in Good condition, which feels exactly right. A study companion should not be too pristine. It ought to look as though it has spent time beside notebooks, course materials and perhaps the occasional moment of low-level panic. Good condition suggests it has been respected, consulted, maybe underlined with purpose, and then released into the world to begin a second life with another reader who may or may not be on the brink of an essay deadline.

There is also a pleasing irony in the second-hand afterlife of educational books. Once bought for a clear and pressing purpose, they later become cultural artefacts in their own right. What was once a tool of structured learning becomes, with time, a curious document of how knowledge was organised and delivered in a particular moment. In 2008, this was a current companion to a live module. Now it is also a snapshot of educational method, a relic of Open University seriousness, and a reminder that “the arts” can, with enough institutional resolve, be broken down into manageable units.

For students, former Open University learners, collectors of academic ephemera, or anyone who enjoys books where high culture meets practical pedagogy, this is a delight. It is earnest, useful, broad-minded and completely unembarrassed by its own function. It knows that art matters, but it also knows that people sometimes need help navigating it. That combination of idealism and paperwork is one of Britain’s finer traditions.

So this is more than just a course book. It is a compact monument to organised curiosity. A guide for people who wanted to understand the arts not by drifting vaguely through them, but by actually studying them, which is a much more demanding and slightly less romantic enterprise. It is thoughtful, quietly ambitious and wonderfully grounded in the reality that beauty may be timeless, but deadlines usually are not.

The Arts Past and Present – AA100 – Study Companion is for anyone who likes their culture serious, accessible and accompanied by the steadying hand of a syllabus. Which, when you think about it, is really quite sensible.

Condition: Good. Still scholarly, still practical, and still ready to help someone make orderly sense of the unruly splendour of the arts. Sold by Crappy Old Books.

Keep browsing: See more Art books Other books by Richard Danson Brown