This website and my YouTube channel are a free, in-depth tour of Western art. It is like a giant book with about 10,000 pages and 200 hours of video. Don’t worry if that seems daunting, you can dip in wherever you wish and to help it is divided into about 60 chapters. Each one has one or more 30-60 minute YouTube videos and 50-80 pages of notes.
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 and in art history. I don’t know whether it is possible and that is one reason I am undertaking this “Automated Lecturer” project.
I occasionally write Posts about Artificial Intelligence, art history and other topics.
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
These talks are an introduction to the 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 are in PDF format, and other optional items include podcasts and a summaries created by Google’s NotebookLM.