First short response

Representation is inextricable from human experience. There is a rather convincing case to be made that without language, one does not have thought[1]; and language is, of course, entirely representational. So it makes sense that poetic and lyric artwork—linguistic art in general—must be bound up with representation. In the simplest sense, this is a kind of perceptory representation tied to our wonderful capacity for imagination: in reading a sentence, I can envisage a remarkably complex scenario and even go beyond what is written on the page, if I wish to. Imagination is, presumably, instantiated uniquely. Our capacity for creating these internal worlds, or for making inferences and connections about different experiences we’ve had, is tied to our identities. Different genetic and experiential factors build us: for example, when I hear ‘Zeus,’ I may have a different mental tokening of ‘Zeus’ than any other person. Thus, the experience of art, at least linguistic art, is inherently subjective. That is why we focus so much on interpretation in literature classes, and it’s also why arguing is so fundamentally human. Value in art is variable precisely because art carries a different meaning for each person who interacts with it. Linguistic art becomes ours as soon as we encounter the words.

            What about visual or auditory art? The same thing appears to be true of these: they become ours once experienced. The value of some work of architectural genius, for example, may not be clear at first. In fact, it may represent some intention or meaning that we aren’t aware of. This is equally true of linguistic art, when we may miss some connection that the artist made, or where an individual may relate a piece to something the artist never intended for it to be related to. This is part of the wonderful subjectivity of art. Only one thing is impossible when it comes to art: encountering a work of art and having no reaction at all. Paintings trigger some thoughts or emotional responses, music can evoke a discussion, or head-bobbing, or simply a vague sense of pleasure, but the fact is we aren’t built to sit in a moment thoughtlessly. Art will cause representation within the viewer, or perhaps it would be better to say that the experience will be represented by the subject in some way. And because we are fundamentally thinking creatures, I suspect it is impossible to create art that does not represent. Even art created with the intention of representing ambiguity or ‘meaninglessness’ represents. Jackson Pollock’s paintings may seem random to one viewer, while another might find pages and pages of material to write about after a five minute viewing. We cannot have an experience without two things occurring: first, internal representation must take place; and second, some kind of mental response must take place because of that representation.

---

[1] Berit Brogaard has argued this convincingly, particularly in “Knowing How: A Unified Account” in Bengson and Moffet’s 2011 anthology.