“How to Look with Soft Eyes”: Darby English on Description as Method

In this first episode of Season 2 of In the Foreground: Conversations on Art & Writing, Caroline Fowler (Starr Director of the Research and Academic Program at the Clark Art Institute) speaks with Darby English, the Carl Darling Buck Professor of Art History at the University of Chicago. In this conversation they discuss Darby’s early affinity with Dutch seventeenth-century painting, his belief in the vital role description plays in art historical writing, and the necessity of developing slow looking in opposition to the velocity that characterizes culture production and our lived experiences more broadly.