Art theory - Topics

Can a theory of art be falsified by a single work? Is there a theory of ugliness or only theories of beauty? LeWitt's sentences about conceptual art are still the best description of it The sublime needs terror to work and mountains alone will not do it Why art history still organizes itself around Vasari's timeline Panofsky's three levels and why the second one gets skipped Peirce's icon-index-symbol triad is harder to apply to a photograph than it looks What does a manifesto actually do for a group of painters? Does reception theory make the viewer the real author of the work? Judging nature aesthetically is not the same as judging art Why the discipline split from archaeology and what it cost Queer abstraction exists and asking whether it is legible is the wrong question Who decides that a style ended in 1900 rather than 1914? What makes something ugly rather than merely badly made? The -ism suffix and why contemporary art stopped needing it How far can a regional label stretch before it means nothing? Influence is the laziest word in art historical writing What separates art criticism from art history as a discipline? Special issues are where a field argues with itself The viewer finishes most narrative paintings without noticing Criticism needs a theory of failure more than a theory of quality The phrase I know what I like is a position in aesthetics not an evasion Can global art history escape the geography it inherited? What counts as visual art keeps expanding What is left to look at when the idea is stated in the title? When theory itself becomes the subject of the artwork Why criteria for quality keep collapsing into personal taste What does the institutional theory of art actually explain about a urinal? Lessing said painting must choose one moment and painters ignored him Constraints make better work than total freedom does Why modernism treated narrative as a contaminant What Panofsky's iconology adds that plain visual description cannot