It isn’t a matter of true or false. It’s possible that every event in a work of fiction actually happened. The underlying themes may be totally accurate. And, even though fiction can employ very imaginative descriptions or improbable actions (though when the actions get too improbable the fiction isn’t quite so fun) but this fantasy doesn’t define the category of fiction.

It seems to me that the defining difference between fiction and non-fiction is the relation of the narrating persona...

Alexander McCall Smith, for instance, creates beautiful narrating persona. Most of his stories stick so closely to a character that the narration takes on the personality of that character. The series that begins with http://www.amazon.com/Ladies-Detective-Agency-5-Book-Boxed/dp/0307261581/ref=pd_bbs_sr_3/002-9608239-6743254?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1182937689&sr=1-3 for instance follows Precious Ramotswe and the narration, like Mma Ramotswe moves deliberately and wisely with attention to personal detail.

In contrast, the main character in McCall Smith’s http://www.amazon.com/Right-Attitude-Isabel-Dalhousie-Mysteries/dp/1400077117/ref=sr_1_6/002-9608239-6743254?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1182937689&sr=1-6 is a philosopher, specifically an ethicist, and the narrative travels a tangential line between events and their ethical ramifications.

This idea of fictional persona in no way denies the many similarities between author and fictional narrator. McCall Smith, for instance, like Isabel Dalhousie works as an ethicist and lives in Scotland where the Dalhousie Mysteries take place. I’m certain there are many other similarities between them—that Isabel in some way shadows McCall Smith himself—but there are enough differences between them to identify these books as fiction.

My question is: do visual artists use persona when they paint? If they do, should this knowledge have any bearing on the way we look at their work?

Rev. 1.1 (2 July 2007)

Citizendium contains a lot of articles but some are “approved” and others aren’t. It would have been interesting to compare the definition of art in Citizendium with that of Wikipedia. Unfortunately, Citizendium has no definition of art, approved or otherwise.

Even so, Sanger makes some interesting comments. If you have any response to his assertions I'd love to hear them.

Christians are called upon to discern (Heb. 5:14) and to approve (Phil 1:10) the things we find to be excellent. This command is not limited to spiritual matters so we can assume that it includes art. It is impossible to know which art works are excellent without a good definition of what excellent art is.

Christian or not, everyone is responsible to make the best use they can of their brains.

For any future definition to have value it must address the issues of the past by affirmation, synthesis, or contradiction. Theorists of the past have made assertions about art that conflicted with one another. Two mutually exclusive definitions of art cannot coexist and equal truths. Instead the assertions of the past have to be weighed against one another. Truths must be sifted from among error. Subjectivity must be burned away to reveal a workable definition. In this way, the potentially confusion of past contradiction becomes a launch pad for relevant meaning.

Just to get and idea of how art has been defined I turned as I often do to Google.

The beauty of Google isn’t accuracy. The information it finds might be out of date, misleading or poorly worded. The beauty of Google is volume. Based on the volume of hits you get on a given topic, you can make some fairly reliable generalizations about the common perception of a given topic.

It could be argued that, since only a minority of the world adds content to the web, you cannot use a Google search to generalize about what a majority of people are thinking. I think it is safe however to say that Google at least gives a good idea of what internet users think on a given topic.

With this idea in mind I used Google’s reference tools using the “definitions” and “thesaurus” functions. These reference tools approximate an accepted academic definition. On the second layer I put results from pages created by individuals or non academic institutions – kind of a public opinion survey.

The search “define: art” yielded accepted definitions from mostly-reputable sources like Princeton, Oregon State as well as from questionable sources like www..com. (I know very little about angelicinspirations but based on their definition of art, I doubt I will use my time to find out more about them.)

Already difficulties appear in the definition process. While many of the entries were interesting and valuable, several were based on acronyms. epregnancy.com for instance defined art as “All treatments or procedures that involve the handling of human eggs and sperm for the purpose of establishing a pregnancy. Types of ART include IVF, GIFT, ZIFT, embryo cryopreservation, egg or embryo donation, and surrogate birth.” Cisco defined art like this. “1. audible ringing tone. A signal sent back to the calling party to indicate the called number is ringing. 2. administrative reporting tool. A web-based application for Cisco CallManager that generates reports on performance and service details. See also CDR and CMR.”

Others defined the word based on its use in a specific vocational field. In printing for instance art can be “Any photograph, map or illustration used in preparing a job for printing.” (imcprint.com) or “All illustrations used in preparing a job for printing” (nap.edu). In book collecting “art is the trade abbreviation for artificial and is used to describe certain book binding materials” (Collectbooks.about.com)

Other definitions are specific to a genre or movement in art. If you’ve been asking yourself “What is Critical Postmodern Art” then look no further, milforded.org has an answer for you.

Once these off-the-track definitions have been weeded out we are left with two basic scholastic definitions.

Most definitions focused on either the process or the physical object of art. Princeton divided their definition into three components that summarize fairly well the basic definition of Art.

the products of human creativity; works of art collectively; "an art exhibition"; "a fine collection of art" (Here)

the creation of beautiful or significant things; "art does not need to be innovative to be good"; "I was never any good at art"; "he said that architecture is the art of wasting space beautifully" (Here)

a superior skill that you can learn by study and practice and observation; "the art of conversation"; "it's quite an art" (Here)

Princeton’s definition brings out the difference between the noun and verb forms of the word art.

How useful is their definition? How supportable? It may not matter.

Another definition reads

[art] divides into psychological (personal) and visionary (collective). Art can never be reduced to psychopathology because visionary art is greater than its creator and draws on primordial images and forces. It stands on its own merits. It compensates for the one-sidedness of an era. Rather than a symptom or something secondary, it's a true symbolic expression, a reorganization of the conditions to which a causalistic explanation reduces it. (Here)

This second definition minimizes both process and product of art and focuses on the social purpose of art.

Google is great at telling what people have thought about a topic. The googler (is that a word yet?) can see that process, product, and purpose have all been issues that past art-theorists have had to grapple with. Whatever happened in the past, future art theorists must come to grips with these three issues.

Google is not authoritative on the meaning of any topic, but it can help you to see what other’s think about it. If Google isn’t a vast mine of data to be processed it is a least a shovel to dig into the internet. It may not tell you the meaning of everything but it can atlas past thinking about it. Don’t take it’s answers for granted but listen to them as you would to any individual. The answers it gives, after all, are the collected answers of individuals everywhere.

There are some broad categories of literature which inform how we read individual works. I’m thinking particularly, at the moment, of fiction and non-fiction.

If a work is categorized as non-fiction my attention is put on the data the work presents. In this case historical detail, factual reliability, and/or logical cohesiveness become the basis for judging the value of the work.

With works of non-fiction however I’m focused more heavily on the meta-data. Overall structure, metaphorical proportion, and plot cohesiveness.

So, when I look at a painting, I don’t automatically look for the persona that the artist has developed. I assume that personality visualized is the artists own. This seems, in many cases, to be a mistaken conclusion.

Is this lack of a fiction category (which I, perhaps mistakenly assume to be common) simply the result of western thought? Is it just that aestheticians for years have spoken of truth and beauty together? Or is there something unique to visual art that assumes some level of representation?

Here is an image of the invitation designed by Brian Rees.

Join us if you can.

Following is mine.

Several of the painters in the exhibition had two wonderful pieces but had a third work that seemed inconsistent with their other work. One such painter was Lauren Clay. “SUBTERRANEAN” and “LITTLE TRUTHS FOR HER TO REST IN” have a soft and mysterious beauty that made me want to turn the page to see the third work. Imagine my disappointment when I was confronted with the flat and relatively unappealing “A BOW TO THE MODERN MALAISE”.

Fortunately there are also those, like Jennifer Drummond, who showed three consistently powerful works. Drummond’s simple if diminutive drawings remind me of a Matise in their unabashed simplicity. It is as if Drummond is telling us that she is confident of these three images even if the rest of the world is hard to make out.

To Benjamin Jones goes the Post-modernism award. His drawings are powerful and achingly conflicted. Is the aesthetic distance part of Jones’ intellectual, Hegelian dialectic or is it just a fond nostalgia for those rosy days of Dada. So… to Jones I say “Fishing….confused….James Joyce’s PORTRAIT OF AN ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN………...Duchamp……….Gunga Din …………decamp…….”

Third pace goes to Anna Keck, more specifically to “WATCH ME WHILE I SLEEP”. Unusual process and a great color sense combine to draw you in. You want to listen close to whatever whisper Keck has for you.

Second was “COYBOY Nº. 2” by Nicole Charbonnet. Powerful if ambiguous imagery combined with an almost disturbingly tight palate shout for a strong female roll model. Even if I disagree with the political connotations I can’t overlook the power of her subtle painting. Charbonnet’s painting doesn’t weaken in her other works either. In fact, “SAFARI” shows an even stronger technique. Her surfaces are superb with their incised background imagery.

Far and away, my favorite painting is “VILLA NEL BOSCO” by Cheryl Goldsleger. Her deep technique is totally appropriate for the maze forms she constructs. Layer upon transparent layer of encaustic and ink, Goldsleger’s work breathes new life into an archaic, labyrinthine motif. Goldsleger has cut through the Gordian knot of tangled drawing and concept without sacrificing formal beauty. Somehow the monochromatic nature of the works leaves you to think that the puzzle of the world is not cold or hopelessly difficult. Instead you are led to think that the solution is only obscure.

Shameless plug to other artists: Greenville artists! Quit complaining about how the current state of education that minimizes the arts. Do something about it! Get involved in this project and use your abilities to help meet the needs of the children in your community. I’m not sure what the bets way to get involved is but I know that if you contact the folks at the Metropolitan Arts Council. They can point you in the right direction.

One concept from the seminar that caught my attention was Vygotsky’s zone of proximal development. (There are lots of web site about this but THIS is one of them.)

Vygotsky believed that tasks could be divided into two basic categories (or zones).

The zone of actual development (ZAD) is full of tasks a person could to without help. Students come into the educational environment with the necessary skills to do certain tasks. They don’t need to be taught how to hear or see (thought they may need to be taught how to interpret their sense impressions). There are other tasks, however, that a person cannot accomplish on their own.

Vygotsky’s thinking about this second category is what he is known for. The zone of proximal development (ZPD) contains tasks that students cannot accomplish on their own. I might be able to read all the letters in a Latin epigram. I may even be able to pronounce the phonemes of the same epigram, but I would need the help of someone else to gain an understanding of the epigram. The help might take the form of another person—a master of Latin—who can translate the poem for me. Or I might get help from others through books they have written on Latin. In either case I have to have some outside help to accomplish the task of comprehension.

The concept of ZPD informs many situations other than those found in the classroom. Rugged individualism may be an attractive philosophy but it doesn’t play out well in life. I’ll refrain from using a trite expression about men and islands but it is none the less true that we cannot accomplish anything on our own. This concept is expressed in the New Testament in terms of the body. No single part of the body can accomplish its task alone. The eye cannot see without the cooperation of the muscles that raise the eyelid or the optical nerves that communicate with the brain.

How does art play into the ZPD model? (Why am I talking about it on a blog devoted to aesthetics?) Art is persuasive. Enticement is one of the principle uses of art. Enticement can be negative but it doesn’t have to be. In the case of education art can entice learners to step out of the ZAD into the ZPD. Art can be just the help a person needs to accomplish the task they couldn’t do on their own. Art can tempt us to change. Encourage us to think in a different way. Or it can guide us along a different path.

Vygotsky believed that teachers worked in the student’s ZPD connecting skills and concepts that the child had mastered with new skills and ideas that the student would not be able to master on their own. The artist’s role is similar. Art has to have some element that connects with what the viewer already knows. Only on this common ground can art pull the viewer into the ZPD and help them to an action or way of thinking they would not have come to on their own.

Art exists in the ZPD.

Why is it? I love poems that employ concrete imagery in more than a descriptive way? Hamlet’s rank un-weeded garden or a star sending out sometimes red and sometimes blue rays.

I don’t claim to understand music but when I hear some concrete audio reference I feel like my brain can get a handle on the work I’m listening too. Even if the reference is suggested by a third party who may or may not know any more than I do about the piece. If the music is in a film and connected to a character or a set of images it stays locked in my mind as a unity of audio-visual experience.

My goal in painting is to use images in this same concrete connectable way. I know that people attach meaning and force to images. “That’s the beauty of Collage and found object painting” I tell myself.

So why is it so easy to slip back into trotting out the same old clichéd, seemingly universal images? Advertising slogans and torn away bits of print media? Why is it that it’s so easy to make art about art instead of art about people and places and things?

The beauty of concrete imagery is the difference between “a” and “the.” It’s hard though not to overlook values in “the” and use the image only for it’s “a” qualities. The bowler hat becomes “a” reference to Magritte but the personal history of “the” hat—that particular bowler hat—is forgotten in the euphoric rush that comes with symbolic representation.

Collage has been developed to such an extent that there is a common visual vocabulary to it similar to the visual vocabulary of cubism. Earlier cubist came up with a vocabulary for themselves but followers replicated the beautiful vocabulary that they didn’t own. Schwitters started using ad-art in his collages in 1919 (link) and collage artists are still doing it today.

There’s nothing wrong with building on another artists ideas or taking inspiration from them. The challenge for every semi-ambitious artist is to develop their own set of visual words without loosing their audience. Not new for the sake of new but new because there’s little value in calling something new work if the ideas are all borrowed from art-historical sources.

This is the reason that artists have to develop their perceptive abilities. New images and visual vocabulary are all around us but we have to see and filter it.

The artist has to have something to say. If I’m too focused on stylistic concerns I’ll slip into the easy flow of meaningless visual babbling and eye candy—sweet and low for the soul. One way to make sure that I’m saying something is to evaluate my visual vocabulary to see if it is personal and concrete. Do I have a good reason for choosing the images I’m using or are they just an expected greeting to my viewers.

Artist: how are you?

Viewer: Fine. And you?

Artist: Fine.

Concrete images keep things exciting and fresh. Even older collages still impact us because the images relate to the work and not to all the historical examples of collage. They make the works interesting to regular folks not just other artists and art historians who know all the visual references. Visual allusions should bring a deeper layer of meaning to the work but if they are too much on the surface the work will be shallow, hollow men.

Even as I say it I think to myself “That seems little extreme.” But before I thin the credo let me explain that…

I believe that humans are linguistic by nature. We are not defined by the words we use but we find or create word to define our world. Further words are tools with which we build ideas.

The Judeo-Christian concept of man asserts that he was created in Gods image. God created everything by speaking it into existence—He created with words. No surprise then that man, in God’s image, cannot create or conceive of creation without words.

Communication is part of necessary adaptation. Adaptation occurs by one of two forces.

Force one is natural selection by which the defective or inadequate options are removed from the pool of possible options. In language this happens when we choose not to use some words or phrases that might get in the way of the message we want to communicate. We choose not to behave in certain ways because we see that those behaviors will not help us to achieve what we want. Natural selection alone is not adequate to solve the worlds riddle. If you have to tell your neighbor something you might eliminate a lot of unhelpful words but narrowing the pool of word doesn’t necessarily mean that you will find the word you need. Natural selection is a negative approach (it relies on restriction) and can only be relied upon when the pool of options contains all the necessary solutions. (Natural selection is the provable part of the evolutionary theory. Evolutionary theory deals with this fundamental flaw by claiming that random mutations can add new solutions to the pool of genetic options. I’m an agnostic where this claim is concerned.)

Force two is creation. Creation is the process of generating new solutions. New solutions might be a combination of old ones but more often they reshape basic materials in a way that multiplies (as opposed to adding) their effectiveness.

Art attempts creative communication. The goal of the artist is to mold a new solution from basic concepts. This new solution is then encapsulated in the work of art and tossed into society.

Each work is like a bottled message bobbing on the ocean of society. When the bottle containing the message (in most cases the artwork contains the message in a cognitive bundle but the art work is not itself the message) plunks onto a strand of sand where you sit you won’t immediately get the message. Just looking at the container doesn’t convey the message.

You might open the bottle and look at the message in it and if you understand the language in which it is written you will be able to read the message. Here is where the seed concept comes in. The seed is the message encoded in the art. Language is the cultural soil that the seed must have in order to grow in your mind. Language prepares you to receive the message in the work of art. Without this soil construct you won’t get the message. You might look at the art but it won’t make sense to you.

The seed of art grows in proportion to this soil. Knowing how to speak a language means that when you listen to people speak in another language you can probably pick up on some emotional clues based on pitch and volume. The better you understand the language being spoken the more your get from the speech. Increased preparation before hand means increased comprehension.

Preparation comes in a lot of forms but it all enables comprehension. Without this preparation there is no comprehension. Solomon said that the simple person reading the proverbs would get some basic information, the wise man who reads it would be able to cultivate wisdom, but to the person whose heart had not been prepared with a fear of God the book would be puzzling or empty. Looking at art without the necessary preparation is trying to understand a blank sheet of paper.

2. Principle (or judgment). Here the artist develops a set of basic rules for their work. When an artist is confronted with a choice of options they can return to these basic rules and make a specific decision based on the rules. Artists in the past have made rules such as: “traditional tools and techniques are the best,” “make art representational,” “paintings should be based on atmospheric impressions.” These rules could be helpful or not. Sometimes they focus an artist by limiting the range of options. Other times, they hut an artist by channeling his creative energy in worthless directions.

3. Examples. Artists sometimes choose one or more artists that they appreciate and try to make works “like” that artist. Most artists have been impressed and inspired by historical works and other artist. Often artist learn more about technique and visual communication by looking at extent works than they do reading about those work without seeing them. The principle danger here is that an artist who paints “like Picasso” may never be known for anything more. It may not be valuable to the world to have another Picasso painting.

Certainly these three strands of thought are often braded to form a stronger cord. It’s notable that these three paths include a spectrum from inductive to deductive methods.

The words were “attention economy” and the link led to an article called “Attention Shoppers!” by Michael H. Goldhaber. Goldhaber, according to a footnote on the article is “completing a book on the attention economy.” Read the article if you want to know more about this topic.

The idea is that we are not in an information economy. (Information abounds to the extent that it would be equally valid to say that we are in an oxygen economy.) Instead, we exchange attention with one another.

The discussion question is this—are we indeed in an information economy and if we are, how does that affect art? What does a move toward an attention economy mean for the art world? What will change? What will go unchanged?

Capons use of scripture to support his thoughts imply that he believe the Bible to have some authority. If the Bible says a thing is good then there must be something good about that thing. (I should clarify that this book is not written in an argumentative tone but rather, as the title suggests, in a reflective manner. Capon’s goal is to make the readers think for themselves not to supply them with a lot of readymade answers.)

Humans have a natural desire to base their thinking on something that they believe they can trust.

1. Institutional: institutions define what works should be called art.

2. Elitist: an elite group decides which works should be called art.

3. Populist: art is defined by what is popularly called art.

4. Lexical: the word art can be defined by common usage.

5. Idealist: There is an ideal art object (probably not physical) by which other works of art may be judged. The more they conform to the ideal the more worthy they are to be called art.

6. Objectivist: This is a broad category that includes many of the others. It just says that art should be judged based on objective attributes. Objective attributes can be experienced by one or more senses like color, line, or pitch.

7. Subjectivist: Another broad category that defines art based on subjective attributes. One definition of the word subjective is ‘taking place within the mind and modified by individual bias; "a subjective judgment"’ (www.cogsci.princeton.edu/cgi-bin/webwn).

8. Naturalist: art is a reflection of nature and the closer it mirrors nature the better the art will be.

It’s not hard to see that none of these definitions seem to account for art as we know it today. The thing that interests me most is how each thought school relies on some source for authority.

John Dewey in Art as Experience bases his definition of art on evolution. Basically he says that art is a process which helps people adapt to their environment so just about anything can be called art. Dewey spends almost a whole chapter saying that we shouldn’t eliminate everyday occurrences such as supper from the category called art. The most authoritative source that Dewey trusted in was science. Whatever science said he believed and science said that all things—from maggots to men—are the product of chance and random processes.

The result is that Dewey spends a lot of time backpedaling from his false start. If evolution is the evaluative principle of art then there is no value difference between any two works that fall into his art category. It doesn’t matter how well a work was made, if it helps people to adapt to their environment it can be called art. Dewey realized that this wasn’t a tenable of useful definition so he spends the rest of his book putting additional requirements on art so that he can eliminate a bunch of stuff that no one wants to call art from the art category.

Other definitions like the institutional and elitist (often two heads of the same dragon) struggle with dependability. If you believe that an elite group of people define what is classified as art then you have to figure out which people get allowed into the inner sanctum of the elite.

If you think institutions define art, which institutions should be allowed to do so? Do all museums have the right to say what art is? What about governments, or a board of artistic governors?

Of further interest is the assertion that art cannot be defined. If you listen long enough to a person who asserts this their argument usually runs something like this. “As I look at the group of works that impress me as art I am unable to find an attribute common to all of them so there must not be a way to define what is art.” At its bottom this definition relies on the authority of the individual asserting it.

Everyone wants to believe that their definition of art is based on the most authoritative source possible. Whether it’s based on nature or logic, a definition is only as valuable as the authority that asserts it. Whatever the definition, figuring out what authority it depends on is the first step in evaluating the definition. When you formulate your own definition of art, consider what you have chosen as its central authority. No doubt that authority is defining more for you than art.

Fat is not evil.

Capon and I turn to the same source to support our conclusion. God through Isaac promised Jacob “Therefore God give thee of the dew of heaven, and the fatness of the earth, and plenty of corn and wine:”. Fatness, if it were bad wouldn’t be part of a blessing. Rather, it would be used as a curse (“the fat of the land be upon you for this thing” evil, or the converse, “I will maintain the skinniness of your waist all your days” or “the carbs shall not collect upon thee neither shall the calories be stored up in your hips”).

There must be an aesthetic principle here somewhere. Although the aesthetics of food cannot be considered a major player in philosophic circles, it is gaining in interest (Google it and see for yourself). The issue of fat brings two ideas to mind.

First, the historical context of fat as a symbol. It’s clear from the Biblical passage that the people of that time thought of fat as a good thing but fat today is an evil to be avoided.

If you made the same dish of mashed potatoes with a big melted lump of butter crowning the mound and served it to the average person today, they would likely shun it. The negative connotations of fat would cause them to judge the whole dish negatively. They reject good potatoes because they contain bad fat (or carbohydrates but that’s off topic).

This reaction is understandable in certain situations. We should all eat responsibly. For instance, if you know that there is arsenic mixed with the potatoes then you should reject the whole dish rather than try to eat around the bad parts. On the other hand, the fact that some contemporary painters insist on wasting their audience’s time by creating infantile works of art is not a good reason to write off the art world as a whole and call for a return to academic realism (This site calls for just that).

What is worth aesthetic interest here is how butter, the symbol of an invisible concept of fat) has become a negative factor despite the innate pleasure derived from it. People love to eat butter when they don’t know they are doing so. Cream sauces and croissants (good ones) are full of it and people gobble them down. But if you told most people, it’s the fat that make that croissant flaky and delicious they would likely slink away glumly.

Certain symbols are so powerful in a society that even a minor reduction in their presence is seen as good. Put “20% less fat” on a label (that’s 4 pats of butter instead of 5) and you are assured of monetary success. If a government official says 20% less money will be wasted he is hailed as a hero. The symbol of a-little-waste-averted gives a candidate a wholly positive aesthetic to the voting public. People still want the benefits of government spending just like they want the beneficial taste of butter but it makes them feel good to know that they are choosing a little less of what their favorite vice.

Some times an art work is received positively just because it reduces the amount of a negative philosophy compared to its contemporaries. Later, as a work is re-evaluated, that reduction doesn’t seem so important and opinion turns against the work. Some of G. B. Shaw’s plays are like this. He was a leader of the fight for women’s rights in his day but some of the ideas he posited in his plays are looked upon today as dated. His ideas about what women had the right to do was different from what activists today believe.

It’s wise to note that neither that essential value of butter nor of women’s liberty to act in society has changed. Only the definition that contemporary culture places on these terms has changed. The change in definition of butter from a tasty goodness to dangerous fat carrier hasn’t changed the butter itself. The effect of butter has not changed.

Only the appreciation of fat has changed with time. The appreciation has changed. Education affects appreciation but adjusting definitions. Cezanne’s work was not appreciated fully until the people were educated as to his definition of art. Once that definition was grasped the works came alive. The paints hadn’t changed, just the expectation.

Modified definitions however seldom precede the artworks that they encompass. The definition of art that helped people to appreciate Cezanne’s paintings could not have been formulated without his experimental works to guide it.

There is a circular bent to this argument. Possibly though, the aesthetic side of the definition of art (not the physical definition) is a handle by which we grasp art rather than a tool with which we make art. Few great dramatic theorists were also great playwrights.

Maybe art is two mental states connected by an action and an object. Foundational concept, experiment/experience, and altered perception based on impact. This would be the case for artist and audience. An artist couldn’t begin without a foundational concept, they could not proceed without eventually trying something, and they would not know they were done until their perception of the art object had been changed.

A viewer would have no chance of enjoying a work without a foundational concept that was somehow tangential to the art object they were to view, they could not compare the work and their concept with out experiencing the work, and depending on the nature of the comparison their perception of the object would change.

An artist might decide that a cream sauce would be the best way to express the joy of life that they feel. They might, then, begin to test their premise by constructing one (like this one) using butter et. al. As they got closer to finishing the sauce they might taste it to see if it getting across just the message they wanted to communicate before presenting it to whomever they wanted to communicate to.

People may immediately enjoy the flavor of butter or the vibrancy of Cezanne’s colors but once they have been prepared for the butter experience they might appreciate it more fully. It’s only after people see the gift that butter is that they get a hint at its value. Butter as the evidence of a fruitful earth brings with it more enjoyment than churned, salted milk fat.

Second, and even more interesting … well, maybe later.

The first is here but it points immediately here.

Both are worth a read even if you don’t agree with them.