What makes Art art?

So I'm taking this class from a retired photographer and philosopher of art, and one of his contributions to the field was to come up with a schema for how people think about and talk about art.

Basically, he claims that there are 4 major ideas that are important to understanding what art is, and one's theory of what makes a great work of art will depend upon how much value they place on each of these ideas:

1) Craft (or skill)
2) Mimesis (representation)
3) Aesthetics (Form or beauty)
4) Expression

Not another Blog!

So, like everyone else, I thought I’d start a blog.  I know that personal and content blogs are so overdone, that another blog is pretty well just more noise that no one wants to hear, so I’ve justified starting this blog because it will be a great teaching tool. Really, it will be!

I’m a philosophy graduate student and I teach introductory philosophy courses.   I find many of the topics too esoteric and too theoretical for first year undergraduate students to easily grasp the relevance of.  What I’ve been doing is sending out mass-emails to my students relating course content to popular culture and current events in the hope that they might find these ideas easier to understand and more relevant if they see them in context.  Starting a blog gives me two advantages.  First, I no longer have to send emails, I can just direct people to this site, and secondly, it allows me more freedom to say what I want to say, because as an academic without tenure (or even a real job yet!) I have to watch what I say.

But, hopefully teaching philosophy won’t be the focus of this blog (it’s just my justification).  What I’m hoping is to use this site as a forum for developing and exploring ideas about culture, the world, philosophy, and everything else, that while interesting, are not necessarily the types of things I’d want to devote the time and energy involved in producing a journal article or book to.

So, that’s my preamble, I hope during the life of this blog, I say something that people think is worthwhile, or at least interesting.  Enjoy, be offended, or whatever, as long as you react, I’ll feel like I’ve accomplished something.