Art Theory and Practice -the Self Portrait
...n image makes for the illusion that meaning, in visual art, is made entirely within the observer. Some might say that the illusion here is merely the misconception that meaning is ever made any where else. And, of course, the deliniation between individual and meaning IS, indeed, arbitrary. But the notion of entirely subjective meaning is absurd. There lies aesthetic relativism. But even if we avoid that metaphysical ground, (the discussion of objective truth in aesthetics) a culture of observers still undeniably shares a vocabulary. And the lexicon of memes that observers share is no less powerful or even specific for images than it is for words. To take this further, it is no less powerful or specific for music either. The articulatability of that set of memes, however, is generally much diminished in any medium that does not trade in the currency of language. This is so because language is the medium of sentience, (and therefore particularly well positioned to deal in articulatable matters), just as music is the medium of time, as image is the medium of light, as mathematics is the medium of space. In other words, self flattery can occur just as certainly in image or music, but it is more covert. Fewer people will understand that it is...