How to enjoy art (without knowing anything about it) with Ben Street

Today I’m chatting to Ben Street about his new book 'How to Enjoy Art: A Guide for Everyone'. We’re talking about how we can enjoy art without needing to know anything about it.

Ben Street is an author, educator and art historian. He’s also been a school teacher and museum educator. He’s a writer of interpretation for museums and exhibitions and a writer of art criticism. He’s an academic and he writes books - “How to Enjoy Art: A Guide for Everyone” (Yale) and “How to be an Art Rebel” (Thames and Hudson) are out now.

In our chat today, we talk about the values that guide Ben’s work and how he’s passionate about us all being able to enjoy art without needing any specialist knowledge.

We talk about slow looking and open questioning and how we can approach art with the tools we already have within us.

We focus on why looking is so important to the art experience, we explore ways in which we can look for longer and we talk about how scale and space affects how we relate to art.

We discuss why we rarely feel we need to read about a piece of music before we listen to it, but with art, we feel we need to know something about it to look at it. And that artworks come ‘wrapped in text’ before we can even get to them. Why is this? How has this come about?

This chat is jam-packed with ideas and inspiration for you. Here’s my chat with Ben. Enjoy!

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Books - How to Enjoy Art; How to be an Art Rebel