beauty • balance • the body • systems • chance • time • perception • relation • appropriation • authorship • sign and symbol • space • form • matter • immateriality • identity • alterity

• What is beauty?

• Is beauty created, discovered, implied, embodied, pursued, reflected, or rejected?

• What is the relationship between aesthetics and ethics? Between beauty, balance, and justice?

• How can art expose the difference between representation and being?

• How does art reflect the time and the generation from which it was made?

• What is the relationship between art and culture? Does art simply reflect or represent that culture, or is it a generative and participatory force within that culture?

• How are artists uniquely poised to investigate, document, and re-create the world?

• What is political art? Can art create dialogue about activism, injustice, and civil rights, or can it be a rally call?

• How has art been used to serve and aestheticize harmful political ideas and movements?

• How do we assign value to a work of art? What happens to the practice of art when art becomes a commodity?

• How have artists wrestled with the ontology of the image and the material?

• As a practice that thinks through images, learns through the senses, and connects with matter in a direct way, what unique insights does art have to offer the field of human knowledge?

• How can we use the practice of art to reflect upon ourselves and better understand our place in the world?

The Big Ideas and Essential Questions are intended as points of contemplation and departure for the student of art. The answers to these questions are not simple, and perhaps the most enduring understanding would be that the pursuit of art, artistic expression, and the philosophy of art lasts a lifetime, and that these questions are designed to stoke our curiosity and lead us into conversation with other thinkers who have also wrestled with these ideas, rather than be wrapped up and solved with a concrete answer. If anything, art offers new ways to engage with these essential questions: thinking through one's hands and senses and even through materials, leaving behind the primacy of language in how we access knowledge and construct meaning.