Talk:Introduction to Art/What is Art?

not sure if anyone is actively maintaining this at present, but i feel that it's important to begin with a less partisan thesis. in contemporary art pedagody, there is a need (and a considerable demand) for texts which enable students to approach many of the more vital strains of experimental art practice at an undergraduate (or indeed secondary) level. as such, i'm of the opinion that founding the text on a necessarily expressionist paradigm effectively prevents it from engaging thoroughly with, for example, minimal art, conceptual art, and appropriation-based practices, to name just a few things.

might i suggest that instead of letting this statement remain a central assumption of the text, one could introduce a section on central pilosophical issues in reading/theorizing "art." obviously, one of these would be "expression," discussing among other things the conflation of expression and expressionism, theories of communication and transmission, and the impact of major critical discourses (existentialism, phenomenology, deconstruction...) on the approach to the problem of expression in critical and "studio" art practices.

lastly, if more than one or two others are willing to work on this...i'd like to see the taxonomy of media handled a bit differently. it needs to be a bit less classical and more of a set of considered heuristics that acknowldge the extremely contingent nature of the project of distinguishing between media. i'm thinking of things such as the distinction between painting and drawing in much expressionism, the distinction between painting and sculpture in much minimalism, and distinctions between sculpture, installation, assemblage, sound art, conceptual art, software art, etc. that have been nearly impossible to use in any "objective" way for decades now.

at any rate, i'm mostly just wondering who's out there and also interested in working on some outlines for this kind of project.

-chris madak