Free Lectures on Asian Art

One thing I've learned over the years is that isn't easy to find decent material on Asian art traditions outside the confines of a university or museum, and this is true whether we're talking online or in traditional book form. Try to go beyond facile Wikipedia articles or introductory  coffee-table volumes on a topic such as, say, Chinese ink painting or Japanese lacquerware, and you quickly run into nothing but frustration, whereas even individual Western artists like Donatello, Veronese and Fragonard have any number of richly illustrated, scholarly volumes detailing their lives and work. The difference here is not due to anything innately superior in the Western artistic tradition - as anyone who has bothered to learn about Asian arts will attest - but the result of a self-perpetuating legacy of centuries of Eurocentrism, under which the assumption that there is little worth learning about the artistic traditions of other peoples serves as justification for failing to investigate further, the resulting ignorance then being seized upon as "proof" of the initial assumption.

In any case, I have not come to merely rant about the evils of Eurocentric art history, but to point out a useful means of correcting such an attitude, for those who would wish to do so. It transpires that the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco has been offering free lecture series on iTunes dating back nearly a decade, as well as performances, documentaries, and much else besides. As my own interests run particularly towards East Asian art, at present I'm working through the Arts of China and Arts of Japan courses, but the material available is by no means limited to China, Japan and Korea; there is a dedicated Arts of India course, another on South Asia, there are lectures on Islamic art, the Himalayas, and many other parts of the Asian continent. In addition, there are dedicated symposia on Chinese calligraphy, lectures on art as visual propaganda for Asian rulers, lectures on contemporary Chinese art ...

To put it simply, there is a tremendous wealth of highly informative material here, put together by real scholars, and - unlike most things on the web nowadays - this is all done free of any apparent motivation to somehow squeeze a buck out of the audience. If you remain ignorant of Asian artistic traditions after being exposed to this high-quality material, the only target for blame will be your own distraction or disinterest, rather than a lack of good sources to learn from.