What Monet Meant: Intention and Attention in Understanding Art

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The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 62:2 Spring 2004

MARK ROLLINS

What Monet Meant: Intention and Attention in Understanding Art

I am pursuing the impossible. I want to paint theair.

Claude Monet

INTRODUCTION

It has for many years been a working assump-tion in psychology that we can learn a great dealabout perception by studying the viewer’sresponse to works of visual art. A generalperceptual theory should be able to explain theperceiver’s response to various types of visualstimuli. Thus it should tell us how we are ableto recognize the poppies in Monet’s paintingsand understand perceptually a great deal ofwhat Vermeer’s A Lady at the Virginals with aGentleman is about. However, beyond the com-mitment to what has been called experimentalaesthetics, there is often a further assumption:that our responses to visual artworks can beespecially revealing of the fundamental principlesof perception or cognition, in terms of whichthe responses are supposed to be explained.Paintings and drawings are not just one class ofstimuli that must be accounted for. They areparticularly important cases that may tell usmore about our perceptual abilities than ordi-nary objects usually can.

This assumption has lately become apparentin accounts of art in terms of the operations ofthe brain. There are studies of picture recog-nition in cognitive neuroscience, where thepictures in question are works of art, and insuch studies, the explanandum is the aestheticresponse. Moreover, several claims have been

made in connection with this research abouthow the response to art objects reveals funda-mental perceptual abilities. The reason is thatart is designed to exploit, that is, to emphasizeand encourage the use of, our perceptual abil-ities, sometimes in tandem, sometimes workingalone. Thus “various works of art reflect differ-ent properties of our visual system,” MargaretLivingstone tells us, providing a kind of cru-cible in which those properties might bedistilled.1 Semir Zeki cites Constable’s claimthat “painting is a science and should bepursued as an inquiry into the laws of nature”;and for Zeki, the relevant generalizations are the“laws of the brain.”2 Artists are experimental-ists, he argues, in whose works diverse percep-tual functions are dissociated; thus artworks arelike brain images in which various functionshave been localized. If the belief that sciencecan shed light on art is what underwrites experi-mental aesthetics, then aesthetic experimental-ism is the belief that art can shed light onmatters of science. Indeed, on this view, art is ascience; a science of the senses with whichpsychology and neurology might work hand-in-hand.

In what follows, I want to consider somerecent work in which the assumptions of experi-mental aesthetics and aesthetic experimentalismhave been combined. I shall argue that, althoughthe importance of art perception for cognitivescience is, in these cases, not entirely clear,some useful implications have begun to emerge.And while the philosophical significance ofscientific discoveries has sometimes been exag-gerated, this work shows that cognitive science

176 The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism

can contribute something to aesthetics: it shedslight on the nature of interpretation in ourresponse to works of art. One obvious point ofcontact between art and cognitive science is thatartworks and mental states have meaning, andwe must interpret both paintings and people toknow what artworks and mental states theyrespectively exemplify. Thus art and mindmight be seen as reflections of each other inregard to how meaning is had and known. AsArthur Danto has put it, “if a bit of mere paintcan be of the Passion of the Lord, why on earthcannot a state of the brain?”3 Danto’s point isnot that the existence of art demonstrates thetruth of materialism, nor is it that art or mind canbe reduced to the physical substrates in whichthey inhere. Indeed, the latter view is one thathe explicitly rejects. Rather, his claim is that thetheoretical relation of meaning to matter is, inboth cases, the same. Thus, Danto has oftensuggested, understanding actions and under-standing artworks requires a similar kind ofinterpretive response.

How then can bits of mere paint or braintissue be about anything: poppies, even, not tomention the Passion of the Lord? How can suchcontent be individuated, we might ask, when itbelongs to such physical stuff? That is a diffi-cult question, and I will not try to answer ithere. However, my concern is with a relatedissue: How do we comprehend what paintingsor other types of artwork are about? And morespecifically, how do we attribute meanings tothem, as part of the interpretive process bywhich they are understood? I shall argue, in thatregard, that recent evidence reveals a dimensionor aspect of interpretation that has not so farbeen adequately recognized and discussed. Iclaim that this aspect of interpretation dependson fundamental features of perceptual psych-ology. To that extent, art interpretation revealssomething about how the mind works. In add-ition, I will try to show that the attributive aspectof interpretation requires adverting to the art-ist’s intentions. Thus, understanding it shedslight on a venerable issue in the philosophy ofart. As Livingstone suggests, an artist canexploit various visual capacities; thus heexercises control over the perceiver’s response.In particular, the composition of a painting cangive rise to certain patterns of attention, and thishas a profound effect on perceptual processes

themselves. Painting the air, Monet’s impos-sible aim, involves manipulating visual capacitiesin order to create artistic effects. Throughneuropsychological activity produced by hispaintings, the perceiver is able to recognizecritical components of what Monet meant.

I. THE REGULATIVE FUNCTION OF THEARTIST’S INTENTIONS

One of the basic questions about interpretationis whether there is a single correct interpretationand, if so, by what standard its correctness isgauged. A familiar standard for correctness isprovided by the artist’s intentions. We can takethe correct interpretation to be the one that com-ports with them. This is, for example, ArthurDanto’s view. On his account, the artwork is notsimply identified with what is in the artist’smind. Rather, the intention is the cause, ofwhich the artwork and its meaning are theeffect, the effect being a physical object underan interpretation. Nonetheless, the artist’s inten-tions serve in a regulative capacity: intentionsconstrain what counts as interpretive success,even if they do not actually constitute theartwork themselves. In this sense, they providecorrectness conditions on the use of interpretiveclaims. They supply the interpreter with amodel for the constitutive efforts that are, onDanto’s view, the interpreter’s lot. Thus Dantoasks: “How close is my interpretation in thecase of Fountain to Duchamp’s? Close enough,I suppose, and in any case the work I havesought to constitute could be the work hemade.”4

The question then is, what are the limits onwhat an artist could have made? For Danto, thelimits have to do with what historical conditionsallow: “The possible interpretations are con-strained by the artist’s location in the world, bywhen and where he lived, by what experienceshe could have had.”5 These are substantiveconstraints that make the compatibility of aninterpretation with the artist’s intentions morethan mere logical consistency alone. Of course,the experiences an artist could have had willdepend, not only on the larger historicalcontext, but on the psychological make-up ofthe artist as well. And to some extent, Danto’stheory allows for that fact. As he tells us,

Rollins What Monet Meant: Intention and Attention in Understanding Art 177

“history supervenes on beliefs.”6 Nonetheless, itis clear that history is really what matters onDanto’s account. Intentions (and psychologicalprocesses more generally) must themselvesultimately be understood in terms of it. AsDanto puts it, “not everything can be intended atevery time”; which is to say, intentional psych-ology is subject to historical constraints.7

However, once psychological considerationsare introduced, the door is opened to describingthe regulative function of artistic intentions inanother way. Indeed, Jerry Fodor has argued,once we acknowledge the importance of psych-ology, history simply gets left behind: “Theuniversality of an artwork consists precisely inits independence from its historical context.”8

On Fodor’s view, what matters instead are theperceptual and cognitive abilities that allhumans share, in terms of which the artist’sintentions can be described. Thus he introducesthe concept of virtual intentions: “It is, I think,the internal connection between aesthetic valueand virtual etiology that we acknowledge whenwe speak of important artworks as ‘timeless,’‘universal,’ and [their] ability to speak from,and to, the human condition as such.”9 Based onthat conception, Fodor construes the regulativefunction of the artist’s intentions, not in termsof the content of the actual artist’s attitudes, butin terms of what a person equipped with ourmentality might have meant, given the standardlogic of beliefs and desires. What matter are notthe intentions of the artist who actually producedthe painting, but an artist using his or herperceptual and cognitive equipment in a certainperiod and place. Correctness will not consist inidentifying the artist’s actual intentions, but inidentifying the intentions that, under the relevantcircumstances, human psychology would mostlikely allow. On this view, appealing to psy-chologically possible intentions is a device onwhich any correct interpretation must be based.

To some extent, the issue between Danto andFodor can be understood in terms of a largerand ongoing philosophical debate. A fundamen-tal question about the role of the artist’s inten-tions in interpretation concerns wherein,exactly, those intentions reside. On the onehand, they might belong to the actual artist.10

On the other hand, they might be treated ashypothetical intentions; which is to say, thosethat an art maker, on the grounds of all available

evidence, might plausibly be said to have had.11

Although hypothetical intentions will oftencoincide with actual ones, in principle they candiverge. The question in that case is this: Couldan explicit statement by the artist be outweighedby other considerations, if a highly plausiblealternative interpretation is put forth? Theactualist says no, the hypotheticalist says yes.Fodor’s virtual etiologies put him in the hypo-theticalists’ camp, with Danto aligned on theother side. Of course, the larger philosophicaldispute about actual versus hypothetical inten-tions has been more concerned with the natureof interpretive practices than psychologicalprocesses, the practices being defined in socio-historical terms. But to paraphrase Danto,sociohistorical practices supervene on psych-ological states. Thus the question can be raisedof what is involved psychologically in takingintentions into account. We can ask both whatgoes on in the mind of the interpreter and whatinternal form or forms an artist’s intentionsmight take.

Those questions are linked in ways that canbe brought out by considering a helpful distinc-tion that Jerrold Levinson has made. Whiledefending hypothetical intentionalism gener-ally, Levinson argues that some intentions mustbe those of the actual artist him- or herself.These are intentions of the categorial type.12

They are set apart from hypothetical semanticintentions because they have to do, not with thespecific meaning of the artwork, but with how itis to be classified or taken; “the maker’s con-ception of what he has produced and what it isfor,” including that it be taken as a work of art.Because such intentions are inherently part ofart-making, Levinson argues, they are the prov-ince of the artist, who should be allowed todetermine how his or her work is generally to becategorized, if not to determine what it means.

I take it that the categorical/semantic distinc-tion is prima facie plausible, on the grounds thatdifferent types of art—for example, a paintingand a poem—can have the same or very similarmeanings (and of course works of a single typecan have different meanings as well). Whilecategories may be defined in terms of mediathat impose limits on what can be represented orexpressed, to intend for an object to be concep-tualized under a general heading does notrequire, nor is it identical to, intending that a


specific meaning be attributed to it. Moreover,the distinction is important for my purposes,because it suggests that there may be a type ofintention that plays a fundamental role in guidinginterpretation, while not providing an explicitmodel for what that interpretation should be.That is so in two respects. First, while categorialintentions do not determine meaning, they dodetermine the type of interpretation that isappropriate to the work. They have authorityover the type of thing the work should be takento be. Second, actual categorical intentionsimpose some limits on the range of meaningsthat can be ascribed; for “without knowledge ofthem one is powerless even to begin to sortout . . . meaning.”13 In both respects, categoricalintentions serve what I have termed a regulativerole.

The question then is how to single categorialintentions out. That is a question with two parts.On the one hand, it concerns the differencebetween categorial and semantic intentions. Onthe other hand, it is a problem of how finely thelines around a categorial intention should bedrawn: At what level of abstraction or detail arethey best described? I discuss the first issue inthe next section, where I consider a generalmodel in aesthetics. I take up the second prob-lem, in light of empirical evidence, in the sec-tion after that. However, a few preliminaryremarks will help set the stage.

As part of his account of the differencebetween categorial and semantic intentions,Levinson proposes a distinguishing mark,which concerns the location and accessibility ofthe intentions. He says that categorial intentionsare extrinsic to the artwork, in the sense thatthey are not “implicit in, and extractable from, awork or its observable manner of production butreside instead in . . . the [artist’s] behavioraldispositions . . . [or] certain states in . . . [the art-ist’s] head.”14 This is in contrast to semanticintentions. The latter are in some sense intrinsicto the work and can be derived from it by wayof an inference that is based on an examinationof the art object, together with the context ofpresentation and publicly available evidence ofother kinds.

But in what sense, more exactly, are semanticintentions embodied in artworks in ways thatcategorial intentions are not? In one respect, thepoint is just that the two types of intention are

about different things: semantic intentionsconcern what the artwork is about, that is, whatit represents or expresses. These give the workits token identity and make it the particularartwork that it is. Categorial intentions, on theother hand, are about the status of the work asan object of interpretation, its type identity as anartwork per se. Thus the latter sorts of inten-tions are extrinsic to the content of the work andare not apparent in what it depicts or otherwiserepresents. Categorial intentions are not “extract-able” from the artwork because they are not“displayed” in it in the ways that semanticintentions are; for example, through propertiesthat denoted objects are shown to have. Moreover,Levinson argues, the same perceptually identicalobject can be the result of different categorialintentions. Thus such intentions cannot be iden-tified through an examination of it.

This is where I wish to propose an amend-ment to Levinson’s view. I am sympathetic withthe claim that categorial intentions are those ofthe actual artist for two reasons. First, if suchintentions are entirely hypothetical, they willimpose very little in the way of constraints oninterpretation. As Levinson suggests, withoutcategorial starting points, the interpreter willhave no guidance as to where to begin. Thatmeans that he or she could not only begin, butalso end, almost anywhere in his or her interpre-tation. In Fodor’s words, “the possibilities forvirtual etiologies can be virtually boundless.”15

Second, part of the interest of the interpretationof art, as in action, lies in making contact withanother mind. That is an interest that hypotheti-cal intentions cannot adequately serve. To insistthat categorial intentions should be actual pro-vides a connection, without requiring that theperceiver’s correct interpretation be dictated bythe artist’s aims.

Nonetheless, I do not think that it follows thatcategorial intentions cannot be expressed andevident in the work, extractable through perception-based processes of some kind.16 I do not meanto imply that categorial intentions can alwayssimply be read off the face of an artwork. Evenif the relevant intentions are those of the actualartist, it does not follow that no hypothesizing(of some sort) is ever involved. Moreover,investigation and analysis of evidence may berequired to discover what those intentions are.However, my view is that categorial intentions


are “intrinsic” to the work in three respects. (1)The evidence presented in the work will oftensuffice to reveal the artist’s categorial intent;often enough so that the engagement of certainperceptual processes is a reliable guide, even ifit is not an infallible one. (2) Extra-perceptualevidence, once it is discovered, must be consistentwith the artwork itself, in the sense that discoveries(e.g., of the artist’s stated intentions) must becompatible with the type of perceptual responsethat the artwork naturally engages. If that is notthe case, then there is at least an open questionabout what the actual categorial intentions are.That is, the perceptual response to the workcarries some weight in defining an intention asactual. It begs the question, I think, to simplydefer to what the artist says in that regard. (3)This reflects a fact that I will try to establish: theactual intentions of an artist are not alwaysencoded in his or her thoughts and beliefs. It ishere that the issue of the appropriate level atwhich to describe categorial intentions willarise. Levinson suggests that technology mightreveal the artist’s actual intentions; electroencepha-lographs or more recent brain imaging tech-niques, perhaps.17 If Zeki and Livingstone areright, artworks function in ways comparable tothose research tools. My view is that this claimbecomes plausible, when we look at underlyingmechanisms and processes through a morefocused lens.18

In order to develop this argument, I turn nowto another account of the regulative role of theartist’s intentions, namely, that of Flint Schier.The motivation for this turn comes from the factthat his work embodies a common theme foundin these debates, an assumption on which allparties seem to agree. The assumption is that artis a form of communication, to which Griceanconversational constraints should be applied.19

Such constraints involve making assumptionsabout what the artist intends. Putting the pointgenerally, to be a work of art, something mustbe seen as intended: (a) to be interpreted in acertain way; (b) to be recognized by the inter-preter as intended to be interpreted in that way;and (c) to be so recognized because it wasintended to be so interpreted. This reflexive con-dition implies that the artist’s intentions regard-ing, not just meaning, but also expectedascriptions of meaning, are themselves part ofwhat an artwork is about. In that sense, correct-

ness conditions are embodied in the artwork,and in reflecting on the artist’s intentions, theinterpreter finds guidance in constructing hisinterpretive claims.

II. PERCEPTUAL RECOGNITION AND INTERPRETATION

In his account of depiction, Schier argues forthe need to appeal to the artist’s intentions in theinterpretation of works of pictorial art.20 LikeDanto and Fodor, he adopts a Gricean reflexivecondition that presupposes communicativeintent: the interpreter must assume that the artistaims to produce a certain type of interpretation,which somehow makes reference back to thataim or intent. And as in the other theories, thisreflexive condition gives artistic intentions whatI have termed a regulative role. They providestandards of correctness to which interpreta-tions are expected to adhere. However, Schier’stheory requires little in the way of reflection onspecific semantic intentions to get a standard ofwarrant or correctness for interpretation. Whatmatters is not the full meaning that wasintended, but only the fact that something wasintended at all, which the artist aims for theinterpreter to understand largely on the basis ofperception. This we might call a minimal reflex-ive condition. The artist’s intentions in thatregard concern having his or her work be takenas pictorial art. I therefore consider them to becategorial in Levinson’s sense.

Schier defines an intention-based interpretivestrategy specifically in terms of the perceptualresponse. He requires, not only that the artistintend to communicate something, but also thathe or she aim for interpreters to understand it,insofar as their attributions of meaning aregrounded on what ordinary perceptual capaci-ties reveal.21 In forming that intention, the artisttakes advantage of a distinctive feature thatSchier thinks that picture perception has. That isits natural generativity: once we have seen andunderstood one picture, we thereby acquire thecapacity to recognize what any of them repre-sents. No particular tutoring is required. Thepoint is not that the meaning of a picture isexhausted by the simple recognition of objectsand scenes in it, based on nothing but ourordinary perceptual skills. It is, rather, that suchrecognition comes naturally to us and transfers


readily to diverse pictures. Because pictureperception requires no special training, it doesnot depend on learning conventions. Thus vari-ations in basic picture perception will not beexpected as the result of differences in conven-tions that have been learned. Therefore, insofaras ordinary perception is a reliable source ofinformation about objects and their properties,picture perception will be a reliable source ofsuch information as well.

However, natural generativity alone will notsuffice to explain the type of interpretation thatSchier argues is distinctive of pictorial art. Herethe problem of nonartistic images used forrhetorical purposes looms large. Interpretationsof images used in advertising, as much as in art,will be naturally generated, too. We can easilyand without training transfer the ability to recog-nize faces on cereal boxes to faces on cartons ofcigarettes. Often such images are representedfor purposes other than simply showing thingsas they are. Thus the artist must make his or herartwork so that a reliance on perception will notbe misleading about his or her purposes, and heor she must somehow assure us visually that thisis what he or she intends. The Artist does thisby encouraging the interpreter to base his or herinterpretation on ordinary perceptual abilities asreliable avenues to the information a picturecontains. The perceiver must be able to recog-nize that the maker intends this; he or she mustbe right, in light of the visual evidence, inmaking the assumption that this is what themaker had in mind. Otherwise, perception couldlead the perceiver astray. Perception mustprovide reasons for relying on perception itself.On Schier’s theory, the perceiver can recognizethat the artist intended that the perceiver shouldbe able to understand the artwork by relying onwhat he or she can recognize there. The per-ceiver is, to that extent, instructed by the artistin and through the artwork to adopt a particularinterpretive mode. Even in adding this reflexivecondition to natural generativity, Schier givesperception a prominent place.

Schier speaks of this reflexive constraint as aconvention, because both the artist and per-ceiver must agree implicitly on it, which meansthat they both have similar ideas about interpre-tation in mind. However, he argues, beyond thisone minimal convention, there is no need forthe interpreter to make assumptions about

further, special rules; rules that we might thinkare required by the various degrees and types ofrealism found in works of pictorial art. Forinstance, in a pen-and-ink drawing, Schier’sminimal reflexive condition should lead us toinfer from our naturally generated response thatthe drawing represents the scene as actuallyachromatic; it should be taken to show that every-thing represented in it is really either black orwhite. In order to avoid that conclusion, it mightbe thought that a further convention must beinvoked to govern the interpretation of pen-and-ink drawings regarding their representation ofcolor in the world. Against that Schier says thatit is not necessary for the interpreter to havelearned such conventions, because generalbackground knowledge will suffice. In the caseof the drawing, the minimal reflexive conditionis sufficient and not likely to be misleading,simply because we know, without any reflec-tion, that the world is not wholly black andwhite. We also know, tacitly, that other peopleknow this. Thus, we do not need to know whatconventional techniques the artist used indepicting his or her object, nor do we need toknow much about the woman or man who usedthose techniques. We only need to know thatreal objects do not look like that.22

I think that Schier is right to hold that a min-imal reflexive assumption, together with somesort of general world knowledge, will lead theperceiver of pictorial artworks to give an inter-pretation that accords with the artist’s categorialaims. I also agree that the artist’s intentions inthis respect must be, in some sense, visiblyapparent to the perceiver. That is, the structureof the pictorial artworks is usually such thatthey provide their own evidence that they werecreated with the intention to communicatesomething, through an interpretation that isheavily perception-based. The problem is thatSchier provides no real account of the psych-ological process by which the relevant worldknowledge is brought to bear and so no realexplanation of how the minimal reflexiveassumption works. Thus he leaves himselfvulnerable to the following possibility: even ifwe can understand, by virtue of our backgroundknowledge, what parts of the painting are andare not intended to communicate, the selectiveemployment of that knowledge might itself beconventionalized.


However, I now want to argue that there is away to avoid that problem; a way that followsnaturally from Schier’s own view. A clueappears in Schier’s allusions to the role of atten-tion in identifying communicative intent. Thus,as he puts it: “[W]hile a black and white pictureof Marlene Dietrich does in fact depict her(inter alia) as being black and white . . . we donot as it happens pay attention to this semantic‘noise’; using common sense, we filter out thenoise and heed only the obviously intended oraccented bits of the picture.”23 Schier links thisattentional process to the notion of naturalgenerativity: “[U]nderstanding one’s first pic-ture need in principle involve no more thansearching the surface of the pictorial symbol forcues which in fact unlock one’s ability to recog-nize the represented objects; this unlocking ortriggering of one’s visual recognitional capacityin turn leads spontaneously to an ability to ascribecontent correctly to the picture.”24 Schier worriesthat such “noticing strategies” will inevitablybe driven by knowledge and beliefs aboutthe appearances of objects. That is, attention topictures will be itself guided by prior categor-izations of the depicted objects, and thus inter-pretation will be top-down and not bottom-up inthe way that his theory requires. In the end,however, he simply asserts that this need not bethe case. Thus, I think it is important to articulatemore precisely how, in recognizing the artist’sintentions, attention is actually supposed towork. Schier’s account of the regulative role ofthe minimal reflexive condition provides a modelfor distinguishing categorial from semanticintentions; for reflexive communicative con-straints do not determine what an artwork means.Nonetheless, the model must be fleshed outin terms of the operations of the visal system.I turn now to an argument that the relevantoperations should be described at a level closerto basic mechanisms than one might havethought would be relevant to an understandingof art.

III. ATTENTION IN/TO ART

The ways in which perceivers scan and focus onfeatures of paintings has, since the pioneeringresearch of Yarbus, as well as that of Noton andStark, been taken to be important as an indicator

of how the perceiver understands what he or shesees.25 However, the understanding in questionis not limited to how the perceiver recognizesobjects and interprets scenes. It has also beensaid to include an appreciation for the individ-ual artist and his or her painterly aims. ThusNoton and Stark have shown that, whileperceivers exhibit stereotypical patterns ofscanning and fixation, different people mayattend to the same picture in different ways, andthe same person will attend to different picturesin different ways.26 The first type of variancesuggests that we can learn something aboutperceivers from analyzing their different atten-tional responses; something about the plasticityof the perception in regard to works of art. Thesecond type of variance suggests that we canlearn something about artists by comparing theattentional patterns their paintings command. Iam going to argue that what is learned, in thatcase, is something about their intentions tocommunicate. It has been said, for example, thatthe scanning and fixation patterns discovered bythe Noton and Stark research provide “an indexof the painter’s hand—that is, as a texture andsignature rather than as representation.”27 Thequestion is how to understand that claim in con-crete scientific terms.

One possibility comes from recent investiga-tions into the role of attention in the perceptionof pictorial art, which have stressed the inter-active character of vision. These studies bring outways in which visual subsystems can be used invarious combinations in the performance of aperceptual task, as well as the essential depend-ence of vision on motor control. A number ofphilosophers and scientists would now arguethat such links can simplify the process of per-ceptual recognition and reduce the need toassign the heavy load to thought in perceptionthat folk psychology and some philosophies ofart would seem to require. This mental eco-nomy is a virtue of the visual system, it is said,because the brain’s resources are definitely lim-ited, and it often operates under serious timeconstraints. In addition, it may be more neuro-logically realistic to posit a mechanism thatdoes not make perception so dependent onlanguage-like representations, such as beliefs andother propositional attitudes. In thus combiningvarious systems (motor control, attentionshifting and fixation, visual recognition), the


perceiver’s brain employs perceptual strategies.Insofar as those strategies are distinctive of art-works, adopting them can convey to the viewersomething of the artist’s categorical intent. Thisis so if perceptual strategies figure in the artist’sconception of how he or she wants the work tobe taken; that is, the artist’s understanding ofpictorial art.

There are currently two lines of thoughtabout how attention might work to limit thereliance on internal representations, and abouthow to understand the nature of interpretationof visual art in neuropsychological terms. Onthe one hand, a number of theories emphasizethe perceiver’s reliance on features of the envir-onment; thus I refer to them as externalistaccounts. On the other hand, internalist theoriesdescribe strategies in terms of relations amongsystems in the brain.28 On both lines, the artist’screative efforts and the perceiver’s response tothem depend on naturally occurring attentionalstrategies. To recognize the artist’s strategicintentions, the perceiver must adopt them, or atleast must exert some extra effort to employperceptual strategies of a different sort. It is pre-cisely in adopting these strategies or exertingthis effort that the perceiver (or the perceiver’svisual system) recognizes what I have referredto as the artist’s minimal communicative intent.Acknowledging artistic strategies in this waygives them a regulative role, without requiringmuch knowledge about the artist.

Externalist Strategies

As an example of how this authority might beexercised by the artist through the features ofpaintings, we can consider the relation betweenperception and motor control. Thus, DanaBallard argues that “the constraints of the bodydetermine the nature of cognitive operations,”because orienting movements are inherentlysequential, and that fact affects the nature ofsubsequent judgments about what the perceiversees.29 In the case of eye movements and atten-tion shifts, these constraints are defined in termsof deictic reference, a kind of pointing viafixation and gaze that “bind(s) objects in theworld to cognitive programs.” This bears on thequestion of how much internal representationperception requires. On Ballard’s model percep-

tion is highly task-dependent, and internalrepresentations are constructed only as neededand (as we might put it) on the fly. The onlyinformation retained in working memory whenthe hand reaches for the paintbrush is just whatis necessary for it to move from point A to pointB; no more comprehensive mental record orimage is required. Likewise for the eye inscanning a picture. There is no need for theperceiver to base recognition of objects in apainting on an elaborate internal representation,because the perceiver has before him or her thepainting itself. On Ballard’s account, isolatedindividual feature detectors and deictic markersas instructions for linking one feature to anotherthrough eye movement will suffice. The fix-ation points that Noton and Stark identify inKlee’s Old Man Figuring would thus be con-strued on this model as deictic markers thatcarry the artist’s “signature” in ways the visualsystem can recognize. It does this just insofar asit is guided by them.

The evidence for the thesis that the mind-brain uses only rarified representations plusattention comes from the fact that the eyes ofordinary artwork viewers (and not only artconnoisseurs), will return again and again tothe same fixation points. Such repetition wouldbe unnecessary and waste valuable time if theviewers had committed to memory a record ofthe relations among the features on the firstgo-round. Therefore, the evidence suggests thatsuch comprehensive memory representationsare simply not built up in the mind. Second,a set of fascinating experiments shows that, ifa feature is changed during the time that asaccadic eye movement is made, the perceiverswill usually not notice the change. Given thetask of reproducing an arrangement of coloredblocks of different shapes (in a computerarray), subjects move their eyes rapidly andrepeatedly back and forth between the modelarrangement, the resource area where unar-ranged blocks are available, and the workspacein which the reproduction is to be made. Whenthey fixate on a particular block, they will notbe able to report a color change that occursduring the shift of attention from either theworkspace or resource area back to model. Theargument then is that color information is notregistered in memory, being unnecessary forthe task.


However, it seems unlikely that the externalistmodel will suffice to account for the recognitionof objects or spatial layout in pictorial art, andtherefore, that it does not fully capture the rangeof strategies through which the artist’s commu-nicative intent is expressed. The model confrontsan important issue, namely, how to explain theconnection between fixating on points on thesurface of a painting and fixating on pointsthat are represented in the scene. In general,I would argue that the extent and nature ofinteractions across visual subsystems can betaken to embody more in the way of internalrepresentation than a strictly externalist accountcan allow.

As an example, consider Monet’s (1878)painting, Springtime through the Branches. Init, Monet produces the impression of three-dimensional volume in a forest scene. He doesthis by representing leaves on the branches insuch a way that there are many possible falsecorrespondences between the leaves as they areregistered differently by the slightly differentspatial locations of our eyes. Thus, in effect,Monet produces the experience of depth in aforest by making it impossible to resolve pre-cisely the position of each leaf in space. But inso doing, he is simply enhancing the way thevisual system ordinarily works.30 In this case,eye movements play an important role, one thatrequires more internal machinery than deicticmarkers and feature detectors working alone. Itis known that the visual system is divided intotwo systems of cells or pathways, one for objectrecognition (What), the other for spatial location(Where). The What system is also subdividedinto one pathway for form and another one forcolor. In general, the Where system can pick outareas of luminance contrast in peripheral visionand send a message to motor control to movethe eyes so that they foveate in one of thoseareas. However, when the scene is representedwith considerable spatial imprecision (as inSpringtime through the Branches), eye move-ments foster not only a sense of depth butvibrancy, because new feature alignments arecreated with every shift: “the visual systemcompletes the picture differently with eachglance.”31 The question then is, what is theneuropsychological apparatus by which this isachieved? For an answer, we must turn tointernalist accounts.

Internalist Strategies

As an example of internalist strategies, let usconsider Ramachandran’s argument that visualrecognition depends on the fact that certainfeatures play a diagnostic role.32 Such featuresserve to alert the visual system to importantregions of space that are likely to be informa-tive. They direct attention, in other words. Howthis works is shown in connection with thephenomenon of subjective contour completionin art. The perception of subjective contours is,of course, an illusion, and illusions have oftenbeen taken to reveal fundamental facets of per-ception. The familiar Kaniza triangle is a casein point. In it, wedges cut out of three dark cir-cles located at the angles of a triangle cause acoherent triangle to be seen in front of a planewhere the circles are placed, even though thereare no real lines representing the triangle’s baseand legs. In this case, two dimensional lineintersections give rise to the experience of threedimensions, in the figure-ground relations theyproduce.

Ramachandran considers a variation on theKaniza triangle, in which surface shading ratherthan line intersections plays the diagnosticrole.33 An illusory oval shape is perceived whenthe appropriate disparities in luminance aresuperimposed on a luminance ramp (a back-ground in which there are systematically gradedchanges in lightness and darkness). This is so,despite the absence of an actual oval contourline. In this case, the shape is seen, not justin front of the background, but as three-dimensional itself; that is, it is perceived as afloating sphere. Ramachandran argues that thisdemonstrates the way in which internal repre-sentations play a crucial role in perception, a rolethat goes beyond mere feature registration anddeictic marking of feature location, but withoutthe use of elaborate three-dimensional, inference-based constructions. On his view, the recognitionof an illusory two-dimensional form influencesthe perception of shading across spatial locationson the surface of the form, which in turn influ-ences the perception of three-dimensionalshape. That then further reinforces the percep-tion of two-dimensional contour. In this case,the perception of three dimensionality is not dueto a strict sequence of stages in which first a2-D and then a 3-D representation is produced.


Moreover, the illusory 2-D contour could notinfluence the perception of shading, Ramachandranargues, if the visual system were making carefulmeasurements of (and basing precise calculationson) changes in luminance across the surface. Thusthere is both an interaction across subsystemsand a representational economy in this case.

It is important that Ramachandran explainshow this is possible in neuronal terms. Specific-ally, he argues that, in the case of shape fromshading, features are attributed to regions of spacein which they do not literally appear, namely, ascomplete but illusory contour lines around theshaded surface of a sphere. Ramachandranargues that this is because the receptive fields ofcells dedicated to features that are represented(e.g., partial contour lines) actually expand. Thosefeatures then partially activate neighboring cellsthat would normally respond to other things; forinstance, shading gradients across the surfacethat the incomplete contour begins to delineate.In that case, there is a kind of short-term andsmall-scale plasticity that has an important effecton how the image is perceived. As a result ofthe expansion of the receptive fields of somecells, the receptive field properties of other cellsare modified, so that they now respond as ifconfronted with stimuli to which they wereoriginally dedicated, but in a different, less robustway. At the same time they become responsiveto stimuli appropriate for the “invading” neurons(e.g., contour detectors), and indeed, it is thatactivity that causes the modified response to thesurface shading (for instance), which the“invaded” cells were designed to detect.34 Thusshading patterns come to be seen as locatedwithin the boundaries of a nonexistent oval lineand across the surface of an illusory sphere.

The phenomenon of contour completion isespecially important for art for a number of rea-sons. First, recent research has shown that thevisual system responds to subjective contoursalmost from the beginning of processing, asearly as layer V1.35 That means that figure-ground relations are not computed only athigher levels of processing by way of inferenceto a perceptually organized model, as a whollysociohistorical account might suggest. Second,a capacity for contour completion has beendemonstrated in lower-order animals, rangingfrom owls to insects. If the birds do it and thebees do it, then it is implausible to think that

conventional knowledge plays much of a role.Thus contour completion and related phenom-ena in the perception of visual artworks must begiven a naturalistic account. Finally, althoughthere are computational models that can simu-late aspects of contour completion based on astrictly feedforward network model of informa-tion processing, it has been argued that theycannot explain why the Kaniza triangle not onlystands out, but seems brighter than its back-ground. For that, interactions across systems arerequired, as is feedback to V1 cells from cells inV2, which are also known to be responsive tosubjective contours. Variable brightness can, insome cases, be an aesthetic property; thus thereare prima facie reasons to invoke internaliststrategies to account for our recognition thatsomething is a work of art.36

For instance, on an analysis offered byLivingstone, Monet’s historically importantpainting, Impression at Sunrise, depends as anaesthetic object on certain artistic effects;specifically, the illusory sensation of strangelypulsating brightness in the sun.37 And those,Livingstone argues, depend on relations amongfunctionally specialized visual systems. In thiscase, the relevant properties are color andluminance, as targets of the What and Wheresystems, respectively. The sun in this painting isbright orange, set distinctively against grayishblue clouds; another kind of illusory floatingsphere defined, in this case, by color contrast.But the sun and the clouds are identical inbrightness (the amount of photons they reflect).The orange sun is actually no lighter than the graybackground against which it is set. To the spatiallocation system then, the sun is virtually invisible,but to the object recognition system, it clearlystands out. The fiery sun is there, but its positionis poorly defined; thus it appears to scintillate.

In such cases, there is some evidence sug-gesting that, although real and illusory contoursdraw upon the same mechanisms, there may bea “unique signature for illusory contour repre-sentations” that set them apart for the viewer’sbrain from contours that are really there.38

Although the exact nature of the neuronal signa-ture is a matter of dispute, one bit of evidence isthat V1 cellular activity is somewhat suppressedby illusory contours; with real contours, this is notthe case. Moreover, patterns of co-activationin V1 and V2 are better coordinated with real


contours, and more out of phase for illusoryones. Of course, subjective contours are alsoencountered in nature; they serve to break upcamouflage. But in nature, presumably the factthat they are subjective is not noticed, whereasin art the effect may be evidently enhanced. Thepoint then is that the use of artistic devices canproduce a response in the visual system suffi-cient to produce the illusion of seeing an object,but in such a way as to signal the fact that theyappear in a representational context, and thusby design. In that respect, I suggest, they arediagnostic, not only of objects, but of the artist’sminimal communicative intent.39

Of course, in the examples I have considered,there is an obvious narrowing of focus. The ana-lyses suggest that communicative intentions areembodied in small-scale internal representationalevents: microintentions, to use a qualifier that haslately often been used. This narrowing of focusto a lower level of analysis of the artist’s inten-tions is important, and it is also found inBallard’s externalist account. He argues thatthere are “primitive deliberative acts,” such as areinvolved in shifts of attention, on a time scale ofapproximately one-third of a second. Those pre-cede “primitive physical acts”; brush strokes orarm raisings, which take two to three timeslonger to generate. Upon those depend “primitivetasks” taking, say, ten seconds: a speed chessmove or a continuous brush stroke producing aChinese calligraphic sign. It is at the level ofprimitive deliberative actions that deictic markersand system interactions are called into play.

Thus both externalist and internalist theoriespoint in the direction of a perceiver’s under-standing the artist’s categorial intentions byadopting miniature strategies that the artworksuggests. To that extent, interpreting art is likeinterpreting actions, according to a recent revi-sion of Danto’s view: “[I]t is possible that whatis rendered as a paradigm of a basic action, likethe raising of an arm, may in fact prove undersuitable magnification to be a concatenation oftiny movements indicriminably small in them-selves so far as the arm raiser is concerned.”40

The point applies as much to brush strokes asarm raisings, as when a slow motion film ofMatisse drawing a leaf show a series of hesitantstarts and stops. And it pertains to artistic inten-tions as well, for those can be treated as mentalactions on Danto’s view. Thus, while the mind

may be like a text, comprising beliefs as “sen-tential states,” we have to leave open the possi-bility that beneath the level of interpretation thatis appropriate to such representations, there isanother at which the artist’s minimal communi-cative intentions reside. That level involvesmicroscopic events in the brain.

IV. COMMUNICATIVE INTENT REVISITED

The result of invoking attentional and percep-tual strategies is a naturalistic account of theinterpretation of art, one in which recognizingthe artist’s intentions plays an important role.The examples of art I have mentioned allinvolve techniques that serve to compelattention, in various ways, in order to produce acertain effect. I have argued that the artworksthus convey to perceivers the artist’s minimalcommunicative intent. By causing the effects toappear to the perceiver, the artist gives theperceiver to “understand” at a nonverbal, sub-personal level that what he or she confronts is awork of pictorial art.

I now want to argue that this account has cer-tain philosophical virtues, in addition to theempirical grounding I have described: it is notsusceptible to many standard objections thatanti-intentionalists have made. Specifically, itdenies the possible unknowability of minimalintentions, which are available to the perceiverin the work of art, by construing knowledge interms of perceptual strategies that the artworkencourages the perceiver to adopt. The accountalso provides for unintended meanings, becauseminimal reflexive intentions ground correctinterpretations, but do not require them to repli-cate the fuller meanings the artist had in mind.Finally, once they are viewed as vested in theartwork, even minimal intentions can misfire.Indeed, failure consists precisely in their notbeing apparent to the perceiver, and thus in notregulating the perceiver’s subsequent response.

This last point calls to mind a problem notedearlier: that different categorial intentions mightlie behind objects that are identical, as far asperceptual recognition is concerned. In suchcases, as in the case of expressive failures,categorial intentions cannot be expected to playa well-defined regulative role. The very propertiesthat usually signal artistic intent might be found


in an ordinary object, a plain, unembellishedpicture, a picture embellished for rhetorical butnonartistic purposes, or in two different worksof pictorial art. Put in terms of my account, itwould seem that any of these items could beorganized visually so as to encourage the sameperceptual strategies in every case. If so, wewill have to find another basis for differentiat-ing their makers’ categorial aims. But the ques-tion is what theoretical significance those limitsshould be taken to have. It is undeniable thatthere may be occasions when we are required togo outside of perceptual recognition to deter-mine the sort of thing an object was intended tobe taken as. But I would argue that the evidenceI have considered shows that we need not, andshould not, take those cases to tell us whatinterpretation is or must be, or how categorialintentions are or must be established, as guidesto the interpretation that ensues.

Thus Zeki, Ramachandran, and Livingstonehave identified artistic devices and perceptualresponses to them that are characteristic of art-works. And they appear to be uncommon as fea-tures of natural objects, nonart artifacts, ordinarypictures, and even rhetorical flourishes in picturesused to achieve political or promotional ends. Theimplication is that there are contingent facts of thematter about representation and interpretation, ofwhich a theory of art understanding should takeaccount. These include neuropsychological factsabout how we use our perceptual abilities, whichpresumably underwrite the creation and under-standing of art in our world. The evidence showsthat, because of the nature of perceptual processesand their underlying mechanisms, some strategieswork better than others for revealing commu-nicative intent. That such strategies are oftenreliable—and hence often relied upon—is notundercut by the possibility that there might beinstances in which they are not.

V. CONCLUSION

I have argued that it is possible to give a nat-uralistic account of interpretation for visual artand that such an account necessarily makes roomfor artistic intentions. I claimed that the artist’sintentions impose constraints on interpretationsinsofar as those intentions concern the perceiver’sinterpretation itself. The intention, in that case,

is to create a product that guides the perceiverthrough a particular type of attributive processor sequence and encourages him or her to relyon this guidance as a reliable one. I discussedevidence that shows that, in that respect, thespatial location of features by way of eye move-ments and attention shifts is an essential ingre-dient, the contribution of which is grounded onfunctionally specialized systems in the brain thatinteract. I claimed, in that regard, that the artist’sminimal communicative intent could be graspedby the perceiver without appealing to conventionalbeliefs or extraperceptual knowledge. This grasp-ing consists in the perceiver’s processing behaviorbeing facilitated by perceptual, especially atten-tional, strategies that the composition of the art-work tends to compel. It is vested concretely inunderlying mechanisms for interactions amongsystems, in particular for attributing features toregions of space and for identifying objects in ascene. These mechanisms are identified at smallspatiotemporal scales.

The upshot is that the artist’s intentions donot dictate the meaning or correct interpretationof an artwork, but they must be considered forany interpretation to be correct. On my account,the artist’s minimal intentions define an attribu-tive process, which constrains possible mean-ings, not as reference constrains meaning, butby controlling the flow of information and thestrategies the interpreter can employ. Under-standing this control function not only makesappealing to the artist’s intentions plausible, itsheds light on how the interpretive process itselfhas aesthetic properties: perceptual effects, suchas brightness, shimmer, a sense of visual mys-tery of the sort that Monet’s paintings produce.

Thus we understand, through visual processes,something of what Monet meant: to do theimpossible, to paint the invisible air, is to paintother, visible things in such a way as to exploitconstraints on the visual system to produce a richarray of atmospheric, color, and shading effects.41

MARK ROLLINSDepartment of PhilosophyWashington UniversitySt. Louis, MO 63130

INTERNET: [email protected]


1. Margaret Livingstone, Vision and Art (New York:Harry N. Abrams, 2002), p. 10.

2. Semir Zeki, Inner Vision: An Exploration of Art andthe Brain (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Science, 1999), p. 3.

3. Zeki, Inner Vision: An Exploration of Art and theBrain, p. 30.

4. Arthur C. Danto, The Philosophical Disenfranchise-ment of Art (Columbia University Press, 1986), p. 45;emphasis in the original.

5. Danto, The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art,p. 46.

6. Arthur C. Danto, “Responses and Replies,” in Dantoand His Critics, ed. Mark Rollins (Cambridge, MA: Black-well, 1993), pp. 193–216.

7. Danto, “Responses and Replies,” p. 201.8. Jerry Fodor, “Déjà vu All Over Again,” in Danto and

His Critics, ed. Mark Rollins (Cambridge MA: BlackwellPublishers, 1993), p. 52.

9. Fodor, “Déjà vu All Over Again,” p. 52.10. Noël Carroll, Beyond Aesthetics (Cambridge Univer-

sity Press, 2001), pp. 197–213.11. Jerrold Levinson, The Pleasures of Aesthetics

(Cornell University Press, 1996), pp. 175–213.12. Levinson, The Pleasures of Aesthetics, p. 188.13. Levinson, The Pleasures of Aesthetics, p. 189.14. Ibid.15. Fodor, “Déjà vu All Over Again,” p. 52.16. This requires me to distinguish between categorial and

semantic intentions in other ways. The most obvious way isto advert to different types of content and argue that categorialintentions are simply not about what semantic intentions areabout. To be sure, the matter is complicated if categorialintentions are said to be embodied in an artwork. In that case,they are themselves part of what the artwork is about. The factthat something is intended to be seen as an artwork is part ofwhat the work means. Thus the categorial/semantic distinctionbecomes blurred. Even so, I will argue that aiming to representor express the fact that something is art is a special case, onethat can be cashed out in terms of the processes and mechan-isms by which catgegorial intentions are accessed.

17. Levinson, The Pleasures of Aesthetics, p. 208. Levin-son’s point is different than mine. He cites this possibility aspart of the argument against the relevance of actual seman-tic intentions, even if they can be discovered.

18. I address the problem that one and the same objectcan be the result of different categorial intentions below.Here I note only that the problem of many possible inten-tions for one object is as much a concern for semantic inten-tions as it is for categorial ones. It cannot be resolved by theexternal-internal distinction alone. Compare Levinson, ThePleasure of Aesthetics, p. 190.

19. See Danto, “Responses and Replies,” p. 200; Fodor,“Déjà vu All Over Again,” p. 48; Carroll, Beyond Aesthetics,p. 200; Levinson, The Pleasures of Aesthetics, pp. 177–178.

20. Flint Schier, Deeper into Pictures: An Essay on Pic-torial Representation (Cambridge University Press, 1986).Schier’s focus on pictures might be thought to be extrane-ous to aesthetics, because pictures include both more andless than paintings and drawings of the artistic kind. How-ever, attributing aesthetic properties to pictorial artworksrequires understanding what those artworks depict. Thus atheory of pictorial representation is a necessary conditionfor an adequate theory of pictorial art.

21. The mere fact that the artist’s intentions concern theperceiver’s attributions of meaning here does not makethem semantic intentions. The intentions in question do notarticulate the meaning that the perceiver is expected toattribute. They are not about what the artwork is about.What the artist intends in this case is that the perceivershould make his or her attribution of meaning in a certainway, namely, on the basis of perception. The intention is toproduce a mode of interpretation that is, for Schier, distinc-tive of pictorial art. Thus it is categorial in form.

22. This suggests part of an answer to the problem thattwo identical objects might be born out of different categor-ial intentions. Schier argues that constraints on the uses ofobjects in different categories, in effect, militate against theobjects being seen as strictly identical. While there can bestrong similarities in the representational devices found in awork of art and an advertising image, he claims, the devicesmust be less apparent in ads than they are in art. Unlike thecase with art, commercial uses of selective or emphaticstrategies aim to persuade us, often without our being awareof it, that real objects do look like that. In contrast, as Fodorputs it: “Artworks qua artworks can be intended to per-suade; but they can’t, qua artworks, be intended to be hid-den persuaders” (“Déjà vu All Over Again,” p. 49).

23. Schier, Deeper into Pictures, p. 172.24. Schier, Deeper into Pictures, p. 61.25. A. L. Yarbus, Eye Movements and Vision, trans.

L. A. Riggs (New York: Plenum Press, 1967); David Notonand Lawrence Stark, “Eye Movements and Visual Percep-tion,” in Perception: Mechanisms and Models (San Fran-cisco: W. H. Freeman and Company, 1971), pp. 218–227.

26. Noton and Stark, “Eye Movements and Visual Per-ception,” p. 234.

27. Claude Gandelman, “Reading Images,” in TheEncyclopedia of Aesthetics, vol. 2, ed. Michael Kelly (NewYork: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 467; emphasis inoriginal.

28. For example, Dana Ballard’s theory of animatevision (“Animate Vision,” Artificial Intelligence 48 [1991]:57–86) and James Cutting’s theory of directed vision (Per-ception with an Eye for Motion [MIT Press, 1986]) are, incertain respects, externalist views. On the other hand,Ramachandran’s utilitarian theory of perception (“Interactionsbetween Motion, Depth, Color, and Form: The UtilitarianTheory of Perception,” in Coding and Efficiency, ed. ColinBlakemore), Kosslyn’s principle of opportunistic process-ing (in Image and Brain [MIT Press, 1994]), and Zeki’sneuroaesthetics (Inner Vision: An Exploration of Art andthe Brain) are internalist accounts.

29. Dana Ballard, Mary Hayhoe, Polly Pook, and RajeshRao, “Deictic Codes for the Embodiment of Cognition,” inNational Resource Laboratory for the Study of Brain andBehavior Technical Report, 95.1 (University of RochesterPress, 1996), p. 1.

30. Margaret Livingstone, Vision and Art: The Biologyof Seeing (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2002).

31. Livingstone, Vision and Art: The Biology of Seeing,p. 74.

32. Vilayanur S. Ramachandran, “Interactions betweenMotion, Depth, Color, and Form: The Utilitarian Theory ofPerception,” p. 347.

33. Ramachandran, “Interactions between Motion,Depth, Color, and Form,” p. 354.


34. Compare also, in that regard, Semir Zeki, A Vision ofthe Brain (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Science, 1983),pp. 220ff; and K. Nakayama and M. Mackeben, “Sustainedand Transient Aspects of Focal Visual Attention,” VisualResearch 29 (1989): 1631–1647.

35. A. Nieder, “Seeing More than Meets the Eye:Processing of Illusory Contours in Animals,” Journal ofComputational Physiology (2002): 254

36. Of course, the fact that a perceived property can bean aesthetic one is only a prima facie reason for explaininghow objects are taken to be works of art, since naturalobjects can have aesthetic properties. If such properties areto reveal categorial intentions, then they must also be seenas artistic, that is, the product of devices used by artists toengage the visual system in ways characteristic of works ofart. I discuss this point further below. I should note here thatwhat the prima facie reasons are reasons for are explan-ations of art interpretation in terms of internal perceptualstrategies. That is, the fact that properties of the sort Idescribe occur in works of art, where they arguably figure inaesthetic appreciation, motivates an account of how per-ceivers take something to be a work of art, as a matter ofpsychological fact. That is distinct from the question ofwhether such properties play a role in the definition of ‘art.’There is the obvious danger of circularity in singling out asubset of aesthetic properties labeled as ‘artistic’ as part ofthe definition of ‘art.’

37. Livingstone, Vision and Art: The Biology of Seeing.38. Nieder, “Seeing More than Meets the Eye,” p. 254.39. This is the point that Ramachadran and Hirstein

make, I think, in saying that all art is caricature. (V. S.Ramachandran and William Hirstein, “The Science ofArt: A Neurological Theory of Aesthetic Experience,”Journal of Consciousness Studies, 6 [1999]: p. 19). Theterm is used somewhat loosely by them. It means that artinvolves techniques of enhancement and selection bywhich certain perceptual strategies are enforced. Zekimakes a similar argument in regard to color, motion, andexpressive features in art. For instance, he notes thatFauvist artworks often depict objects in colors not ordi-narily seen in the real world. The evidence suggests thatsuch artworks produce activity in different regions of thebrain than either objects represented in their usual colorsor colored shapes that do not represent recognizableobjects at all. Thus, on Zeki’s account, there are responsesin the visual system that are distinctive of, not simplyvisual art in general, but of artworks of different schoolsor styles (Zeki, Inner Vision: An Exploration of Art andthe Brain, pp. 197–204).

40. Arthur C. Danto, The Body-Body Problem (Univer-sity of California Press, 1999), p. 48.

41. I would like to thank Jerrold Levinson and JeneferRobinson for their very helpful comments on an earlierdraft.

Documents

What Monet Meant: Intention and Attention in Understanding Art