On Monday my group, if it can be called such, since it was only me and Alice, gave a presentation on the subject of art history; the slides for this presentation will be posted to my blog. Overall, the presentation went well; we pulled in a variety of topics, including socio-economics, psychological studies, and the nature of plagiarism. As well as that, we made an interesting point strongly enough, and defended it well enough, that we had the rest of the class debating for quite a while, which I think indicates a certain success. Areas that I think I could improve on were; the fluidity of my presentation, and a little more forethought as to issues that could be brought up in the post presentation discussion. I think that my presentation was affected by my nerves a little, and that could be aided by more practice, and rehearsing the presentation with my group, as opposed to rehearsing alone. From this project I learnt a few things, primarily the value of peripheral knowledge in defense of an argument, by which I mean that researching around a subject or argument is incredibly important in having a rigorous argument- for example, someone in the group brought up Jackson pollock as an example of true originality ( a concept that our presentation rallied against), and because I did not know enough about pollocks work to dismiss it directly, I had to construct an argument from what I knew of his place in art history, and therefore did not dismiss the criticism succinctly. To counter that, I also came to realize that some people will never be happy with your work. There will always be those who seek to play devils advocate, asking essentially meaningless questions in order to confuse or provoke. Learning to recognize and efficiently dismiss these people is something I’m going to have to work on.
