Baker is a brilliant, impassioned lecturer. He is engaging and funny, and quick with his patent quips if there is a disruption in lecture (the ghosts of many artists often shut his projector off). If you are engaged in lecture, you will do well grade-wise. I for one did not do a very large chunk of the readings, and I did well. Baker often ties back art works and concepts he introduces in class as an allegory to the decadence of UCLA life.

Take this class if you want to gain a very relevant perspective on art, and modern art (for the two essays, we analyzed art at museums local to campus and in the UCLA Murphy Sculpture Garden), and (I would argue) a mature perspective on interpreting the world around you.

I highly recommend this class to anyone who is generally engaged with the world around them. Don't take up enrollment space if you are going to skip lecture, let someone else take your spot!

I will start this off by saying I did not finish the course, in fact I didn't make it to the halfway point. I luckily had an extra class over what I needed, so I was able to drop it. I was taking this class as a GE, and it was a disaster. The lectures seem to contain no actual content, and are just sort of the rantings of the professor and whatever comes to his mind. He is very passionate, and it is somewhat interesting to hear him speak, but trying to write notes to prepare for an exam or paper is extremely stressful and frankly impossible. The readings are extremely long and many of them off of poorly scanned PDFs that must be read on the computer. These take hours every week and are extremely boring at best, inscrutable at worst. The discussion wasn't better, it was unclear what we were supposed to do, we definitely were graded on doing something there but it wasn't clear what and it seemed like a competition to have the most ideas out to hopefully get the credit. I dropped just before I would've had the do the first paper. The prompt was long (like half a page), rambling, unclear, and a massive undertaking. It involved going to a museum, creating sketches, doing pages and pages of analysis, and who knows what else. I noped out at that point, opting for a stats class instead--that bad. I don't know if this is just how things are done on the humanities side, which is what some people told me, but I hope not.

Selling books. Brand new. On campus. Cheap. I just want them gone pls take them.

Passages in Modern Sculpture by Krauss
Theories of Modern Art by Chipp

hmu **********

Doesn't plan his lectures so just says what comes to mind on the slides which can be super useless and repetitive. Got so behind because of this that a paper was assigned on something we had not covered yet and he would not change the date. Midterm and final were ridiculously long and i do not think i would have passed if this was in person. Starts very early in 'modern' art and only last week/ two weeks were what i was expecting.

The class is very interesting and Baker is surely a character. However, a lot of the textbooks weren't necessary, especially the one he himself wrote.

Baker has a no-electronics policy for lectures. He also pressures people to attend lectures, although there are no consequences if you dip. Your grade in the class WILL depend on which TA you get, so pray that you get a good one, because your TA determines your grade. Find a lenient TA and you'll be chilling.

There are two papers to submit on your own, one midterm, and one final. Each paper is 20% of your grade, the midterm is 20%, the final is 20%, and participation in discussion is 20%. Midterms and finals have a "slide ID" portion of the exam, where you're required to ---MEMORIZE--- the name, date, and artist of a piece of art. There are more than 60 pieces of art to identify. Not fun, but there are tons of quizlets out there to help you out. The essay prompts were not too bad, as long as you pay attention and somewhat skim the readings, you'll be fine.

Baker's lectures were more or less entertaining and funny. Of course, the subject matter can be dull sometimes, but he always cracks us up with a funny (borderline inappropriate) joke. But all in all, he's a great prof.

His lectures were interesting from someone who has never taken an Art History before

There were two papers, a midterm, and a final exam (both midterm and final were in class written and we had to memorize a couple dozen paintings, artists, and dates). Participation was required and there was probably an hour of reading per week.

its a lot of work but manageable if you put the time in
Doable to get an A, but not the easiest GE

Selling all required textbooks for less than new value!! Text at **********

When he starts with introducing modern art as modern French art, I had a feeling this class was not worth it. I don't know how the class or professor has such high ratings, but as a non humanities major with no background in art aesthetics, I would never recommend this course.
You would get a lot of useless reading materials. While you may take some notes from those fancy words (basically intended to be like a snob), you can have the same amount of digestions from any online art forums within minutes. His lectures are boring, always paralleling the same concepts. Some people might disagree, but I had fewer than 10 pages of lecture&reading notes and learned everything I need online and did fine with the exams and essays. Despite zero engagement from the professor, he would still try to intimidate students with the difficulties of understanding the insights of art (I had assumed that his job was to make the process easier).
I still walked away with a lot from this course, but what I learned about art was mostly not taught by him. It is not simply that our tastes differ, rather that I do not recommend his approaches at all, as a mere student of course.

SELLING REQUIRED BOOK Theories of Modern Art by Chipp for $15. I think it’s about 25 or 30 bucks from the textbook store. Text me ********** if interested