my academic future

Just came out of the most productive tutorial I've ever had. (Usually tutorials feel more like repetitions of ideas I've thought about before.) It was with Jack, the only boy in our year, with whom I've never had a tutorial before. In seminars he talks and talks, to the point where tutors have asked him to shut up, something that has really made me notice how men are raised to be confident and self-assured whilst the 12 girls are much more timid despite having really intelligent ideas. Jack is obviously also very smart. He went to Westminster and he's extremely knowledgeable about art history, especially classical stuff and Renaissance, which is a bit alienating to me because all my knowledge is cobbled together and I don't really have a deep understanding of anything, meaning I have to do much more reading for essays and think deeply and even then be unable to write an essay that probes the topic hard enough since I've only had a week to write it.

Anyway, this tutorial was for essays that we were assigned before the vacation. There was a list of almost a dozen questions and we could choose any. I chose to talk about Postmodern architecture's classical pastiche and Jack wrote about Cy Twombly's engagement with the classical. It was truly enlightening on both topics and, as often happens, I now no longer want my tutor to read my essay because it states that Modernism was a complete break from tradition, which I now know is obviously false and a very strong claim to make. Can't wait to be torn apart in the comments...

The stuff that Jack said about Cy Twombly was so incredibly interesting. I previously only knew Twombly visually, as in I could recognise his very distinctive style, but knew nothing else. Turns out Twombly lived most of his life in the Mediterranean and made a lot of work that engaged with Antiquity and mythology and its connection to the present and its ever-changing nature and how it affects our perception of reality, his use of irony and humor, the relevance of his artwork against a backdrop of the Vietnam or Iraq war... I was blown away. I now love Cy Twombly even more than I did before (his work has always just been so alluring and mystifying and breathtaking).

I have absolutely no idea what I might want to specialise in. I'm constantly learning so much. For instance, I used to be completely apathetic to architecture and knew absolutely nothing about it and in over a week I've been able to write 4000 words about Ricardo Bofill and Michael Graves. Doesn't mean I'll specialise in architecture but still...

Topics I'd be interested in taking further:
- Indigenous Mexican art & Mexican art in the first few decades of Spanish colonisation
- Modern Chinese art (20th century) - I'm taking a class on this in 2nd year called 'Art in China since 1911'!! It won't be taught by the legendary Craig Clunas who retires at the end of this year but still, I'm so excited!
- Modernism (e.g. Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, De Stijl, Cubism, Fauvism...) - I'm also taking a class on this in 2nd year that covers this entire topic. It was really tough to choose because it was either this or a class on...
- Film studies. Ultimately I decided not to take the class on film because it was on European Cinema, which I'm sure is very interesting and important, but I'm a lot more interested in Asian Cinema, and I couldn't let myself miss out on the modernism course. I just think it would be cool to be that lady who writes about phallic symbolism in Farewell my Concubine
- Cy Twombly!
- Tibetan Buddhist murals. They're just so beautiful.

Overall I'm interested in any art that is hybrid, diasporic, cross-cultural. That's why my object essay is about east-west dialogue on the porcelain market in the 18th century. And post-colonialism is always a beloved topic of mine. Race relations, feminism, Orientalism... oh my. I know what I'm really not interested in, which is the art of Antiquity or the Renaissance or whatever... I mean, I care, but not really.