Art History Nerd Hats

Art history majors have heard every version of the same question. "What are you going to do with Art History?" and "Do you just look at pictures?" are the two most quoted in the student essays that list them, and the people who love the subject have answered with puns for decades. The best known, Baroque (adj.): when you're out of Monet, has been printed on T-shirts, hats, buttons and cards since at least 1996, according to a Barry Popik survey of the phrase. These art history nerd hats keep that tradition going. Two badges name the major, and the original lines narrate a bad week as an art-historical period: a Blue Period for the books, a Renaissance resting face, a Rothko crier. Rothko is the modern painter most often named for making viewers cry, and Stendhal syndrome, the dizzy, overwhelmed response to great art, was coined in 1979 by the Italian psychiatrist Graziella Magherini. Museum shops get in on it too: MoMA sells a T-shirt based on a 1991 illustration of the history of art as smiley faces repainted in the styles of famous artists. The joke world here is painters and periods, not the museum building, so these sit beside Museum Nerd rather than on top of it. Every design is custom embroidered on an unstructured dad hat. Wear one to the gallery, or give one to the friend who can name the painter from across the room.