Welcome to my completely free, in-depth tour of Western art.
This website is like a giant book about Western art consisting of about 12,000 pages. But don’t worry, you can dip in wherever you wish. It is organised into about 60 chapters each with one or more sections containing my detailed notes of about 60 pages followed by a one hour YouTube video. It is a work in progress, in some cases there are notes but no video yet and in others it is still to be researched and recorded. My aim is to produce a total of about 200 YouTube videos with notes. In some of the sections I have added other items such as short, entertaining podcasts produced by Google NotebookLM.
Please note that some sections contain artworks that depict nudity or violent scenes that may not be suitable for all viewers. The website is for educational purposes only and viewer discretion is advised.
Who Am I?
I completed my first PhD in Artificial Intelligence in 1976 (yes, that long ago). It described a method of building question-answering systems based on conceptual knowledge a bit like ChatGPT but using a conceptual net not a neural net. After a lifetime in business and floating a company on the London stock exchange I completed a degree in art history, an MA at the Courtauld Institute and a PhD that examined the relationship between Charles Darwin ideas and beauty.
This free art history course started in 2014 when I gave private talks to classes in London. In 2020 I switched to YouTube driven partly by lockdown and in 2023 I started to use ChatGPT as an assistant to help me research the talks. My aim now is to combine my two areas of research by completely replacing myself by the end of 2026. To achieve this I intend to fully automate the research, production and giving the talks using AI. This ties together my academic background in AI in the 1970s and art history in the 2000s.
Please feel free to use the talks and the notes but don’t blame me for any mistakes and please double check everything yourself. Humans can make mistakes as well as AI systems.
This is my biography and the best way to contact me is to comment on my YouTube channel.
00 Introduction
Let us begin. These talks and notes are an introduction to the entire history of Western art from cave painting to today. The following chapter headings start with the chapter number and link to a page containing one or more videos on that topic, my lecture notes in PDF form, and other optional items such as a podcast and a summary created by Google’s NotebookLM.