Art Meaning and Interpretation

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CHAPTER 3

MEANING and INTERPRETATION

WHO LEARNS FROM ART? (60)

Suppose that the faculty of a large state polytechnic university is

revising the institution's general education require-ments to

ensure that all students receive a sound education that will be

useful to them in their later lives. Until 1974, all students had to

study the same traditional great works of literature, music, and

visual art. Since 1974, they have been permitted to take any

course about anything now thought of as art, whether it be a

course on Shakespeare's plays, Chaplin's films, Bach's music,

rock and roll, Renaissance painting, or American textiles and

quilts. The Dean of the School of Agriculture insists that even the

more recent requirement be dropped:

Agriculture majors are serious students who come to this

university to learn, and nothing much can be learned from art.

Before 1974, our students were required to study so-called great

poetry and plays and paintings and music. These seem mean-

ingless to me, but, even if they do mean something, students

could never learn what they mean because the experts disagree

about it. The requirement we've had since 1974 is not much use,

but at least our agriculture majors can fulfill it by caking a course

specially designed for them by the Art History Department. (61)

This course is relevant for future farmers. It focuses on agricul-tural art, like

paintings of fruit by Caravaggio, Chardin, and Cezanne; orchards painted

by Van Gogh; pictures of barnyard animals and fowl by Cuyp, Stubbs,

Audubon, and Hicks; flower pictures by Rcdon; and even pictures of

processed food, like Vassallo's The Larder. Even so, learning from art is

not efficient because artistic representations of agriculture, whether in

paint-ing or in such literature as William Langland's Vision Concern-ing

Piers the Plowman, Edward Thomas's "Haymaking," or H.D.'s "Orchard,"

are not as instructive as, and arc harder to understand than, standard

agricultural science textbooks. Is the Dean right that nothing much, or

perhaps nothing at all, can be learned from art, and that, consequently, art

should have no place in a university's core curriculum?

Should we value art because we learn from it and use it to

enhance our understanding of some aspects of the world in which

we live? If art does have value for cognition, what sorts of things

can be learned from it? Do art objects acquire cognitive value by

teaching us about mundane matters of the world, such as facts

about farming? Suppose that those things could also be learned

from other sources, would it not be more efficient to acquire

knowledge from textbooks, for example, than from the less

straightforward process of interpreting works of art? Why should

the study of art be thought of as an appropriate university-level

subject? Some people believe that artworks can instruct us about

certain matters more effectively than standardized teaching

methods. For instance, some think of art as an effective vehicle

for moral education. Others think that art teaches us how to

recognize and deal with emotional states. But those who hold

such views should be prepared to explain how words or pictures

or sounds, when organized intdrcoems or paintings or music,

acquire a special capacity to teach morality or to give us insight

into the nature of our emotions. Moreover, anyone who thinks that

art objects are capable of teaching should also offer criteria for

determining whether what an artwork appears to teach is true.

Our usual tests for truth and falsehood are designed to apply to

statements of theory or fact. Do these tests have any application

to a medium, such as poetry, in which metaphors and other

modes of figurative language are given a larger role than

straightforward state-ments? Can the standard tests for truth be

extended to apply to pictures, including nonrealistic pictures and

pictures that are so abstract as not to be representational at all?

What about music? Can music be used to convey truth? If art has

cognitive value, how can we learn to learn from it? In order to

understand different works, must we learn special symbol

systems or the iconographies of different cultures and stylistic

periods in the histories of the different arts? Or does

understanding a work of art require reference to what the artist

intended the work to mean? Perhaps art's value for cognition

differs so much from our usual methods of learning that we

confuse ourselves by invoking such familiar cognitive concepts as

"understanding," "meaning," and "truth"?

PICASSO'S PORTRAITS

It is said that Pablo Picasso, in response to complaints that his

portrait of the writer Gertrude Stein did not look like her, replied,

"Everybody thinks she is not at all like her portrait, but never

mind, in the end she will manage to look just like it." Roland

Penrose, who reported this remark, added that in later years the

portrait was acclaimed by all as an admirable likeness.'

Describing the painting that eventually became known as La

Femme-Fleur. Francoise Gilot reported that Picasso orig-inally

began a fairly realistic portrait of her—indeed, the underpainting

of that form is still visible beneath the final version. But, according

to Gilot, after working a while on the painting Picasso said: "No, ...

a realistic portrait would not represent you at all." Gilot relates:

Suddenly he remembered that Matisse had spoken of doing my

portrait with green hair and he fell in with that suggestion.

"Matisse isn't the only one who can paint you with green hair," he

said. From that point the hair developed into a leaf form, and once

he had done that the portrait resolved itself in a symbolic floral

pattern.... The face had remained quite realistic all during these

phases.... He studied it for a moment. "I have to bring in the face

on the basis of another idea," he said.... "Even though you have a

fairly long oval fact, what I need, in order to show its light and its

expression, is to make it a wide oval. I'll compensate for the

length by making it a cold color—blue. It will be like a little blue

moon." He painted a sheet of paper sky-blue and began to cut out

oval shapes corresponding in varying degrees to this concept of

my head.... Then he pinned them on the canvas, one after

another, moving each one a little to the left or right, up or down,

as it suited him. None seemed appropriate until he reached the

last one.... He stuck it to the damp canvas, stood aside, and said,

"Now, it's your portrait."' If we want to acquaint ourselves with the

looks of Gertrude Stein and Francoise Gilot, will we learn more

from Picasso's

(left) Francoise Gilot. Photo: Robert Doisncau/Rapho/Photo

Researchers. (right) Francoisc Gilot, La Femme-Fleur by Pablo

Picasso. Photo: Robert Doisncau/Rapho/Photo Researchers.

portraits of them or from photographs of them? Will the portraits

or the photographs be better representations?

How do we determine what the subject of a picture is? At first

glance, the answer in at least some cases seems simple and

clear. A picture's subject is what the picture looks like. A

photograph is a picture of you, not just because you were what

the camera captured on film, but because it looks like you. You

are the subject of your portrait because your portrait imitates your

looks. However, when Gertrude

Stein's friends complained about the discrepancies between her

fea-tures and Picasso's picture, would they have been justified in

using the lack of resemblance to conclude that the painting was

not a picture of Stein? Picasso used a blue moon-shaped oval as

Gilot's face. Why is his picture a picture of Gilot rather than a

picture of a little blue moon? Do the leaf forms he used to

represent her hair picture leaves, or do they picture hair? What

could Picasso be showing or teaching us by picturing Gilot's hair

as green rather than black?

PICTURING HISTORY

One of John Heartfield's photomontages shows Hitler giving the

Nazi salute and receiving in his raised hand some money from a

German capitalist. Heartfield obviously tampered with the actual

photographic image, but it often is said that, by doing so, he

created a truthful statement about a source of Hitler's power.

Edouard Manet was not present when the Emperor Max-imilian

was executed in Mexico in 1867. Manet based his historical

painting Execution of Maximilian on eyewitness reports printed in

European newspapers and portrait photo-graphs of Maximilian

and his generals. Although Manet's painting is not literally a "true"

account of what took place,

- Edouard Manet, The Execution of Maximilian, third version,

1867-68. Stidische Kunsthalle, Mannheim.

it has been said to reveal the "true" synthesis of the impersonal

forces that resulted in Maximilian's death with the personal

sympathy and admiration he elicited in France.'

What can we learn from a picture whose creator does not or

cannot picture what actually occurred? Would the cognitive value

of Manet's painting diminish if the newspaper reports that

informed him were false? Suppose you encounter Manet's

painting in a museum but you cannot find out its title, or have

never heard the story of Maximilian. If all you see is a picture of

three people being shot by a firing squad, can you fully appreciate

the painting and benefit from its cognitive value? And what if you

do not recognize Hitler in Heart-field's photomontage, so that all

you see is a photograph of a man with a mustache who is being

handed some money? How much historical knowledge is needed

to understand works of art? Are we unable to grasp their

meanings or appreciate them if we do not know the historical

contexts in which they were created or to which they refer? And

what if a picture's subject is mythological or fictional, such as

Botticelli's Birth of Venus, which depicts Venus stepping out of a

giant seashell? Can this be a picture of Venus's birth, since

Venus is a mythological entity who never existed and thus never

was born? Given the nonexistence of the event of Venus's birth,

can we learn or understand anything from Botticelli's painting?

"DARK SATAN IC MILLS"

"AND DID THOSE FEET IN ANCIENT TIME" From Preface to

MILTON by William Blake

And did those feet in ancient time Walk upon England's

mountains green? And was the holy Lamb of God On England's

pleasant pastures seen?

And did the Countenance Divine Shine forth upon our clouded

hills? And was Jerusalem builded here Among these dark Satanic

Mills? Bring me my bow of burning gold! Bring me my arrows of

desire! Bring me my spear! 0 clouds, unfold! Bring me my chariot

of fire!

I will not cease from mental fight, Nor shall my sword sleep in my

hand, Till we have built Jerusalem In England's green and

pleasant land.

-WILLIAM BLAKE

The interpretation of the phrase "dark Satanic mills" in this poem

occasioned a vehement argument between critics John Wain and

F. W. Bateson. Bateson charged that Wain's attempt to make the

poem relevant to modern readers resulted in an anachronistic

interpretation:

To Mr. Wain . Blake's mills arc a nineteenth-century textile-

factory: "dark" with the soot from its steam-engines, "Satanic"

because of capitalism's indifference to human suffer-ing.

Aesthetically this interpretation may perhaps be preferable to

Blake's ... There can be no question of Blake or his original

readers giving "dark Satanic mills" ... the sense that Mr. Wain

prefers. There were no grim steam-driven textile factories when

Blake wrote, ... nor apparently did capitalism, as a coherent

economic theory, ever penetrate his consciousness. To sub-

stitute for the Old Testament hand-mills (a civic institution) the

steam-driven mills of the nineteenth-century (the children of the

capitalist entrepreneur) is . . . to re-write Blake's poem. And, in the

last analysis, this is what Mr. Wain is really encouraging the

modern reader to do.'

Wain takes the modem interpretation of "dark Satanic Mills" as an

aesthetic improvement on what the words meant to Blake. Does

that make it the right meaning? If the modem meaning is right,

was Blake's meaning wrong? Could both meanings be right, even

though they differ and may not be compatible?

Does the fact that Blake cannot have been referring to the textile

factories of the industrial revolution mean that the poem ought not

be read as if he had? Or does the fact that readers in later

historical periods are familiar with these factories justify Wain's

assigning a transformed meaning to Blake's poem? Should we

establish the meaning or inter-pretation of an artwork by reference

to the artist's intentions or by trying to discover how the artist's

contemporaries understood the work? Do the meanings of

artworks remain the same throughout history, or does the

meaning of each work change to reflect the changing experience

and interests of audiences in different historical periods? Should

we talk as if artworks possess meaning, thereby suggesting that

art is analogous to language and that its primary purpose is as a

means of communication, or is it misleading to conceive of art in

this way?

IMITATION AND REALITY Although both Plato and Aristotle held

the imitation theory of art, taking artworks to present likenesses of

things, they drew different conclusions about whether art could

contribute to knowledge. Plato thought one acquired knowledge

only by directly encountering the Forms or Ideas that, in his

philosophy, constitute true reality and make it possible to

understand ordinary physical objects. Thus, since art-works arc

merely imitations of ordinary physical objects, which themselves

participate only derivatively in the Forms, they are, as he said in

Book 10 of the Republic, "at the third remove" from reality and

cannot provide us with knowledge. Indeed, artworks are

distractions that divert us from learning about true reality, the

Forms. Thus, art for Plato was not a source of knowledge or even

of reliable opinion. Plato also believed that, because an artist

cannot possess expertise about all the many different kinds of

things imitated in art, artworks cannot even provide reliable

practical knowledge. For instance, a painting may portray

animals, plants, rock, sky, sea and sun, but it is implausible that

the painter could be an expert in husbandry, botany, geology,

meteorology, oceanography, and astronomy. Similarly, a drama

may depict military strategy, shipbuilding, civic life, domestic

organization, or death, but one would scarcely expect the

playwright to be an expert general, shipwright, statesman,

domestic authority, and doctor too. Because Plato found it

impossible to believe that either painter or playwright had the

knowledge to render accurate imitations, he concluded that art

could provide neither intellectual nor practical knowledge. Like

Plato, Aristotle also held that artworks were imitations, but he

claimed that it is natural and beneficial for humans to learn by

imitating and also to learn from imitations that are artistically

made. In circumstances where it is impractical or unilluminating to

try to learn about real things directly, imitations can teach us.

Exploring these matters in the Poetics, Aristotle pointed out that

tragic poetry, unlike history, tends to express general truths, that

is, not just the facts of what has actually happened as history

does, but the kind of thing that is likely or certain to happen.'

History, he said, describes individ-ual, often coincidental, events

that have actually taken place, whereas poetry discovers

generalizable truths about the sorts of things that "probably or

necessarily" occur. These truths govern what happens to us in

reality. But when we are living in the midst of events that accord

with these general truths, it may be difficult to understand them in

their entirety, to discover their patterns, and to draw lessons from

them. So, Aristotle suggested, by composing an imitation of an

action to be acted out on stage, the tragedian can exhibit the

same truth as is displayed by real action, but in circumstances

conducive to learning. Whereas a real action, replete with real

death and real destruction, might distract us from the opportunity

to learn, a suitably idealized replica of the action—for instance,

Sophocles' Oedipus Rex-permits us to comprehend those

principles of probability or necessity that govern human activity. It

is somewhat as studying a plastic laboratory model of a human

heart might facilitate learning about the typical structure of the

heart more effectively than dissecting the heart of a randomly

selected, perhaps diseased, corpse. In such a case, the model

reproduces and emphasizes the heart's essential structure and

general features but eliminates both the idiosyncrasies and

distracting repul-sion of an actual specimen. Viewing classical

thought from the perspective of postmodern art, Arthur Danto

suggested that the Greek tradition established that art's essential

character resided in its difference from real things, and that this

contrast between imitation and reality continues to influence our

concept of art.' Indeed, according to Danto, not only classical

Greek sculpture and tragedy but later artworks as diverse as the

religious paintings of Raphael, the plays of Shakespeare, the

portraits of Joshua Reynolds, the novels of Emile Zola, and the

painting of Renoir all can be seen as unabashedly imitative in the

sense that they seek to represent the real world without posing

any danger of being mistaken for real things. If you go to a

production of Shakespeare's Othello, for instance, and during the

crucial scene in which Othello strangles Desdemona someone

jumps up on the stage shouting, "Call the police! Save that lady!"

you would be astonished that anyone would mistake the acting in

a play for the real act of murder. So, it seems reasonable to hold

that one element crucial to understanding art is realizing that art

objects must be different from "real" things. According to Danto,

however, postmodern artists try to reduce the distance between

art and real things. For instance, as we noted in Chapter 1,

Marcel Duchamp used a real shovel as the artwork In Advance of

the Broken Arm. However, if you needed to dig your car out of the

snow and used In Advance of the Broken Arm to do it, your using

an artwork as a real thing would not be the same sort of mistake

as interfering with the actor playing Othello when he imitates

stran-gling the actress playing Desdemona. The cases arc

different because In Advance of the Broken Arm is a real shovel,

whereas the actor merely imitates strangulation. According to

Danto, postmodern artists characteristically create objects that

are, ambiguously, both art and real things. For instance, Robert

Indiana paints pictures of bull's-eye targets that are imitations of

targets and, at the same time, real targets (since the concentric

circles of the paintings are indiscernible from the concentric

circles of a target). Such cases raise interesting questions. For

instance, if a Robert Indiana painting and a target made for

archery practice were to hang next to each other in a museum,

would it be appropriate for the museum director to object to your

shooting arrows into the Indiana painting? Could he or she

reasonably urge you to restrict your shooting to the target, when

the painting and the target look exactly alike? Not only is it

traditional in Western thought to believe that art tells or shows us

about reality by imitating real things, but it is commonsensical to

think this way. It may seem that the simplest explanation of why

we know that a portrait is a picture of its sitter, or that Gone with

the Wind is about the American Civil War, is that the portrait

imitates in paint the facial shape and features of the person

portrayed, and the novel imitates in words how someone who was

there would describe the clothing and houses and social and

military events of the Civil War. But there are problems in thinking

that whenever anyone understands what a work of art is about, he

or she is learning from the work as from a model or imitation of a

real thing. First, some artistic media, such as music and textiles,

are difficult to conceive of as imitative, that is they do not lend

themselves to resembling other kinds of things. Even in music like

Prokofiev's Peter and the Wolf, where an instrumental theme is

assigned to represent each character in the narrative, it is

implausible to say that the sound of each theme imitates the

sound of the animal it represents. (The duck theme comes

closest, but even here Prokofiev sacrificed faithful imitation of a

duck's quacking to musicality.) Meaning in music seldom is

achieved through direct imitation (one rare exception is

Prokofiev's use of drums to imitate the sound of the hunters

shootingL• the wolf). But even in these cases the imitative sounds

are typically a very small part of the musical composition. There is

another difficulty in analyzing one's understanding of an artwork in

terms of one's recognition of it as an imitation. If artworks

functioned by imitating, then accuracy would seem to be the

appro-priate standard for judging a work's success. The more

accurate the imitation, the more we might expect to learn from a

work, and the easier it might be to do so. Yet in cases like the

Picasso portraits of Gertrude Stein and Francoise Gilot,

representation does not seem to be a matter of accurate imitation.

Indeed, on Picasso's own testimony, part of the Gilot portrait

imitates a moon, but the picture does not represent or mean or

teach us about anything having to do with moons. The picture is a

portrait of Gilot, but not by virtue of being an accurate copy of her.

(70) ICONS, SYMBOLS, FIGURATIVE MODES Since the

imitation theory appears not to provide a sufficiently general

explanation to cover all or even most cases of understanding

works of art, philosophers and other theorists have attempted to

develop more illuminating approaches. One proposal is that

artworks arc a means of communication, roughly analogous to

languages, codes, or the pictorial symbols used internationally.

An example of the last category is the red circle with a line

through it: when the line is drawn through a picture of a cigarette,

it is easily understood to mean No Smoking; when the line is

drawn through a picture of a car, it means No Automobile Traffic.

In fact, this symbol is so widely understood that its meaning is

transparent even when adapted to new or bizarre uses. Are

artworks symbols, and, if so, how do we learn what the symbols

mean? Some people think there are natural symbols whose

meanings we understand without learning any rules or

conventions. Imitations might be considered natural symbols

because the resemblance be-tween imitation and imitated object

is obvious and need not be learned. However, the evidence about

whether people naturally see resemblances, or whether they need

training to do so, is inconclusive. For instance, there is some

anthropological research to show that people who have never

seen a photograph cannot recognize clear photographs of the

most familiar objects—even humans. But there is also evidence

that the objects become recognizable when compensa-tion is

made for such features as the distractingly shiny surface of

photographic paper. Other examples of natural symbolic relations

are the use of a picture of fire or the color red to symbolize heat.

In these cases, it is claimed, people naturally associate fire with

heat, and red with fire, so no one needs to teach them the

meaning of the symbols. But even if this were true, natural

symbols are likely to have meaning only for those who have had

the opportunity to learn to make the associations. If people were

no longer to use matches, gas stoves, and fireplaces, or, indeed,

ever to see a fire burning, a picture of a fire would likely be

ineffective in getting them to think about heat. Clearly, some

learning is needed to understand the symbolic dimensions of

many artworks. John Milton's poetry, for instance, is full of

references to biblical texts, and readers will fail to apprehend the

full impact of his work if they do not understand these references.

For instance, in Milton's famous sonnet on his blindness, "When I

consider how my light is spent," the line "And that one talent

which is death to hide" refers not only to Milton's despair at failing

to exercise his own talent for writing, but also to the parable of the

talents in Matthew 25, in which the third servant buries the gold

coins that his master had entrusted to him. By grasping both

references, the reader understands Milton to be drawing attention

to similarities between the spiritual emptiness occasioned by

being unable to use one's creative talent and the spiritual

emptiness occasioned by denying Christ. Similarly, in much

Western painting, Christian divinity is sym-bolized conventionally

by the halo. A viewer who had not learned this convention would

not understand that the gold rings around the heads of certain

figures in Renaissance paintings signify that the figures represent

holy persons. Nor would someone completely unfamiliar with

Renaissance painting conventions be likely to recognize that the

figures with wings on their shoulders are not freaks or hybrid

human birds, but angels, spirits, or divine beings. Sometimes,

learning a special fact about a particular work, rather than the

conventions of the style or cultural period in which the work was

made, helps us understand it. In Bach's secular cantata "Lasst

uns Sorgen, Lasst uns Wachen: Hercules auf dem Scheidewege,"

the words "for the snakes which tried to seize me with their

lullaby" are accompanied by rising and falling music in the bass.

The winding figures of the bass are often described as

representing snakes, yet what "winds" is not the sound of the

music but the appearance of the notation in the music's score. A

somewhat similar case is that of the fifteenth-century French song

"Belle Bon Sage" by Baude Cordier. Someone who does not

understand the words or the notation can nevertheless

understand that it is a love song—the score is written in the shape

of a heart. In both cases, the meaning of the music is enhanced

for those who have seen, even if they cannot read, the musical

score. These cases, and many others, illustrate how under-

standing the conventions of a stylistic or cultural period, or

knowing enough historical information to decipher allusions, helps

us to grasp the symbolic meaning of artworks or to comprehend

what certainl,.. works are about. Some contemporary

philosophers, such as Nelson Goodman, believe that

representation and description in art are completely conventional.

According to Goodman, nonlinguistic systems differ from

languages, depiction from description, the representational from

the verbal, and paintings from poems primarily with respect to

certain properties of the symbol schemes. Goodman writes in

Languages of Art:

A picture in one system may be a description in another; and

whether a denoting symbol is representational depends not upon

whether it resem-bles what it denotes but upon its own

relationships to other symbols in a given system. ... A symbol is a

representation only if it belongs to a [symbol scheme which has

certain structural properties)? If Goodman is right, to understand

artworks is to understand which symbol systems are relevant and

how they work. (71)

(72) Some of the ways in which artists convey their meaning

undoubt-edly rely on our understanding of nonartistic symbol

systems, such as the conventions of ordinary language.

Figurative language, for example, metaphor and simile, seems to

work this way. From Aristotle on, almost all theories about

metaphorical language (and about pictorial metaphor as well)

have presumed that figurative expressions gain force by operating

in contrast to standard or literal expression. Thus, we understand

the figure of speech "He fought with the heart of a lion" not as

literally asserting that "He had a lion's heart transplant" or "He

used a lion's heart as a weapon," or even "He and a lion's heart

battled against each other," but rather as metaphorically

attributing courage to the way the subject fought. It appears that

we first must understand the usages of literal assertion in ordinary

contexts to recognize when these conventional usages are being

employed figuratively. What else has to be understood to

understand metaphor and other types of figurative expression is

best revealed by careful analysis of a great variety of cases.

EXPRESSION

In response to those who, like the Dean of the School of

Agriculture in the beginning of this chapter, complain that art

objects are not very efficient vehicles for communicating

knowledge, some theorists, par-ticularly in the nineteenth and

twentieth centuries, have proposed that art is expressive of

human feelings, and some insist that what art teaches us about

emotions cannot be learned in any other way. What does it mean

to say that an artwork "expresses emotion"? Among expression

theorists, Leo Tolstoy and II G. Collingwood held very different

views, but both said that artworks communicate because artists

make objects that express their feelings, which in turn are

experienced by those who appreciate the works. But whether we

can appreciate artworks only if we actually feel the emotions they

express is problematic. On the one hand, if someone in the

audience laughs heartily throughout a production of Oedipus Rex,

particularly during the part in which Oedipus first discovers that he

is the murderer of his father and then hears that his wife has killed

herself, the laughter is evidence of an emotional response so

inappropriate to the situation that we may think the person does

not understand the play. So it seems as if experiencing the

appropriate feelings is relevant to comprehending at least some

art. On the other hand, the requirement that one must have

certain feelings to fully grasp the meaning of a work may be too

strict. If you have seen and read Oedipus Rex many times, and

you are seeing it once again to prepare for a literature test, you

may not feel the

(73) emotions you experienced when you were just appreciating

the par rather than making notes and memorizing the plot. In this

case, eves if you do not feel any emotion, it is hardly fair to say

that you do not understand the play. Some expression theorists

do not believe that audiences need feel the feelings of the artist,

or any particular feelings at all, for artworks to express emotions.

These theorists typically observe that we most commonly assume

that emotions are being expressed when outer behavior shows

what is felt. Art, they say, is believed to express feelings when it

has features that are characteristic of human beings expressing

emotional states. Thus, if a piece of music is slow and hushed, it

exhibits the same observable features as humans do when they

are sad. By virtue of these features, we perceive the music as

expressing sadness, even if we do not actually feel sad. Similarly,

horizontal lines appear restful, and vertical and jagged lines do

not, because humans typically assume a horizontal position when

they relax or sleep. Undoubtedly, much great (and minor) art

concerns human emo-tion. The emotion to be understood is

conveyed by a complex set of factors, which may vary from

artwork to artwork. Indeed, in some instances, the emotional

expression we attribute to a work may be affected by other

artworks we have perceived. The following case, cited by Eduard

Hanslick in On the Musically Beautiful, illustrates this point:

How many works by Mozart were declared in his time to be the

most passionate, ardent, and audacious within the reach of

musical mood-painting. At that time, people contrasted the

tranquillity and wholesomeness of Haydn's symphonies with the

outbursts of vehement passion, bitter struggle, and piercing agony

of Mozart's. Twenty or thirty years later, they made exactly the

same comparison between Mozart arid Beethoven. Mozart's

position as representative of violent, inspired pas-sion was taken

over by Beethoven, and Mozart was promoted to Haydn's

Olympian classicism.°

MEANING, INTERPRETATION, AND TRUTH How can anyone

who experiences an artwork be assured that he or she

understands its real meaning? In some cases, we comprehend

what a work is about in a direct, immediate revelation that occurs

during appreciation of the work. In other cases, a work's meaning

is pieced together only after we notice how various features of the

object all contribute to that meaning. Interpretive critics differ in

the method-ologies they employ to construct accounts of the

meanings of artworks Some concentrate on the text, visual

surface, or sounds that constitute (74) the work—that is, on the

art object itself—and draw attention to perceived patterns. Others

investigate the social context in which the work was created, or

examine biographical facts about the artist. Quite often

interpretive critics using different methodologies arrive at quite

different accounts of what a work means. As mentioned earlier in

this chapter, John Wain found a pattern in Blake's poem known

as "And Did Those Feet in Ancient Time" that makes it particularly

meaningful to modern readers. He saw the poem as showing,

among other things, how England's green countryside had been

blighted by the factories of the industrial revolution. This

interpretation of the phrase "dark Satanic Mills" can make the

other things Blake says in the poem especially poignant to the

modern reader concerned with the undesirable effects of

industrialization. Bateson objected to this reading, however,

because his own method of inter-pretation emphasizes historical

fidelity, not the concerns of modem readers. Even though Wain's

account enriches the poem by providing an additional level of

meaning, Bateson said, Blake and his intended audience could

not have understood the poem as a criticism of pollution from

factories because they lived before England's industrial

revolution. Are there cases in which the meaning of art should be

determined by artists' intentions? If so, must the work's meaning

in these cases be limited to what the artist intended? How do we

establish what artists intend? Are there cases in which learning

about the artist and his or her society contributes to our

understanding? Or would historical or biographical evidence

distract us from attending to the timeless significance of the work

itself? Henry James's novella The Turn of the Screw is about a

young governess who comes to an isolated house to take care of

two children. Some strange events occur. According to one

interpretation, fully compatible with the text, James related a story

in which certain strange events are caused by the ghosts of

wrongdoers. If this is the case, the lesson of the story may be

construed to be a moral one about the nature of good and evil.

According to another interpretation, also fully compatible with the

text, the strange events occur only in the mind of the governess

as she experiences a nervous breakdown. If this is the case, the

lesson of the story may have nothing to do with good and evil, but

instead concerns how a person can develop psychological

problems. Must we choose between these two interpretations? If

so, what kind of evidence would be relevant? Would any evidence

be decisive? Some contemporary theorists would resolve cases in

which more than one interpretation of an artwork is proposed by

insisting that each interpretation creates a new and different work

of art. We need not worry about interpretations being incompatible

with each other, with (75) the text, or with the visual surface or

score, in such a theory, because each interpretation creates

another aesthetic object. But there would be in principle no limit to

the number of works thus created, and The Turn of the Screw

would not be a single artwork, but as many different artworks as

there were critics and readers providing interpretations of it. In the

case with which this chapter begins, the Dean is concerned about

whether we can learn from works of art. Some theorists believe

that we can do so only if artworks are capable of being true or

false. Of course, in at least some of the artistic media, an art

object clearly can have elements or aspects that are capable of

being true or false. If the real Mona Lisa, the Renaissance woman

who posed for the painting called the Mona Lisa, had been a

curly-haired blonde, then there would be a sense in which

Leonardo's portrait falsely depicts her with straight dark hair. If the

recently advanced theory that the painting is a disguised self-

portrait of Leonardo is true, the painting can be said to depict

Leonardo falsely as a woman. Similarly, we can say that the many

Gilbert Stuart portraits of George Washington are true in

presenting Washington without a mustache, crossed eyes, or a

harelip, and that Dickens's novels contain true descriptions of

nineteenth-century English social practices. Does it make sense,

though, to speak of an entire art object as capable of truth or

falsity? Is Shakespeare's Hamlet true in addition to being

profound, enlightening, or revealing? What kinds of reasons

would be appropriate for demonstrating that Hamlet is true or

false? In Art and Illusion Ernst Gombrich makes the following

point: "a picture . can no more be true or false than a statement

can be blue or green."9 Just as the kind of thing statements are

logically precludes their having colored surfaces, the kind of thing

pictures are logically a. precludes their being true or false. But

even if art objects are not true and false in the way that the

propositions of science are true and false, there remain cases in

which we desire to raise questions about the truth or correctness

of what an art object conveys. John Berger, for instance,

denounces the whole tradition of Western representations of

women, both in painting and photography, on the grounds that all

the images imply a standard of femininity that is false.' In making

this charge, Berger is claiming not that Western pictures are false

because they contain inaccurate images, but rather that the

images they contain both result from, and contribute to, an

inappropriate standard to measure women. Some theorists

maintain that art can lead us to truths even though artworks

cannot contain or convey directly what is true or false. The

philosopher Martin Heidegger, for instance, believed that the

cognitive value of art lay in its capacity to stimulate thoughts that

(76) led far beyond what was depicted or portrayed. Heidegger

claimed that art revealed an object's truth of being—that is, art

"disclosed" an object's being as being, let it "emerge into the

unconcealedness of its being." For instance, Van Gogh's painting

of a pair of peasant shoes may depict nothing but two empty

shoes, yet

If from the dark opening of the worn insides of the shoes the

toilsome tread of the worker stares forth. In the stiffly rugged

heaviness of the shoes there is the accumulated tenacity of [the

peasant woman's[ slow trudge through the far-spreading and

ever-uniform furrows of the field swept by a raw wind. On the

leather lie the dampness and richness of the soil. Under the soles

slides the loneliness of the field-path as evening falls. In the

shoes vibrates the silent call of the earth, its quiet gift of the

ripening grain and its unexplained self-refusal in the fallow

desolation of the wintry field.... This equipment belongs to the

earth, and it is protected in the world of the peasant woman."

Thus, Heidegger said, Van Gogh's painting lets us discover the

"equipmental quality" of equipment—it lets us know what shoes

are in truth. But it does not do so, he claimed, by means of

propositions or descriptions. Are there good educational reasons

to support the proposal to make courses about art part of a

university's general core require-ments? Answering this question

depends, to some extent, on whether we maintain that everything

that is valuable to learn can be expressed propositionally—in

other words, by using statements that can be proven to be true.

We may be more inclined to include art in the university's

curriculum if we believe nonpropositional modes of learn-ing exist

for which truth and falsity are not appropriate criteria. But if art is a

nonpropositional mode of learning, can it function effectively in

organized educational settings? Are there ways of testing whether

people have been successful in learning from ail? Could someone

convey what he or she had learned from artworks to other people

without their actually experiencing the same artworks? If learning

from art requires direct experience of the artistic vehicle through

which the information is conveyed, what role does a teacher play,

and what are the teacher's contributions to learning from art? We

may note how much easier it would be to answer these questions

if we were addressing some part of the curriculum other than art.

But despite the complexities of understanding how art is related to

cognition, many people believe that an education is impoverish"

ed if art is omitted from it.