Expression theory

Expressionism is another leading candidate for being the answer to the question "what is art?".

One can look at art, all of art, and there are hundreds of interesting narratives which one could pick as a starting point for an investigation of art. Why pick "the history of art as an image" as a starting point over any other?

As a philosopher there is a strong disposition toward beginning with the question "is art mimises" because Aristotle started philosophy of art off with just that claim, that art is mimises. We (philosophers) work from there. Additionally, my particular task in philosophy deals with those areas which (at least seem to) make progress. We can look back over the history of art as mimises and see the technical improvements that lead up to the now.

That said we recognize two related problems. What counts as "very realistic" looking changes over time. Also, what looks natural within a time can look very "period piece" later. The former problem is pointed out by reading accounts of classic images written at the time those images were made where critics would say things like "I thought I could eat the grapes right off the canvas". The latter is pointed to in cases where earlier period artists have faked masterworks and gotten away with it in their time, but later generations can easily pick them out do to the (at the time of the painting) unoticed stylistic devices. (Both of these problems can be noted when one watches a decade or two old special effects dominated movie.)

Still, even accounting for such problems there still seems to be technical development, especially in terms of adding depth and shadows on two-dimensional canvas.

Now, we can see another historical flow occuring from the medieval to the modern that is a succession of modes of expression rather than changes in technical devices. They may often have occured simultaneous, these stylistic and technical changes, but not necessarily though.

One can certainly discuss this narrative as well as any other ... the change of styles from medieval art up thru the moderns. But would would one say about it that is not merely descriptive? Where-as the current that flows through mimises seems to have a "natural" element that allows for progress across paradigms, there seems to be no such "natural kind" in style. One can compare and contrast styles across paradigms (perhaps, the artistic eye may see too differently across time and place to really even allow this), and one can even write a descriptive history of the flow, but there can be no real analytic investigation of that flow, because that flow is very unlikely to be one thing across time and place.

The technical skill progress under mimises may be the kind of thing, though, that is thus analyzable. I am certainly not willing at this point to say it IS useful, thus, but at least it is a candidate. It is a starting point.
I think such a starting point is necessary for a "bildung" narrative to exist, and not just a descriptive narrative.

One nice point in starting also with Danto's thesis that this narrative is over and done is that we don't have to think about the narrative proscriptively, except as it might have been thus in the path. But today we can do the analysis and be "free from" the results of that analysis at the same time.