many different forms in different cultural contexts, but if it is entirely absent
then there is noworkof music, but only the empty decorativeness of a sounds-
cape, mere background.
Similarly, Kendall Walton has argued that abstract paintings typically
invite us to see shapes in front of and behind one another in a three-
dimensional pictorial space. For example, Kasimir Malevich’sSuprematist
Painting(1915) invites us to see“a yellow rectangle in front of a green one.”
This is“a full-fledged illusion,”since the painting is literally“a flat surface,
with no part of it significantly in front of any other.”^14 The point of this
illusion is thepresentationin two dimensions of a three-dimensional pictorial
space for visual exploration. This presentation invites us to think about the
experience of exploring this abstract“world in the work,”including encoun-
tering resistances, energies, balances, distractions, and so forth, as an
abstract pattern of the experiences of living in our ordinary natural and
social world. To be sure the presentation is indefinite. No distinct vase of
flowers, say, is presented for visual recognition. But thought (about subjec-
tivity’s paths in its natural and social worlds) is abstractly invited and
focused, fused to perceptual experience of the work.
The line between empty decorativeness (wallpaper, soundscapes) and art is
fuzzy. Decorative elements are parts of many successful works. But the
presentation of a subject matter–inviting thought about it, fused to the
perceptual experience of the work–isacriterion of art. One might rank as
follows the various media of art on a very rough scale from those in which
the emphasis lies more on the perceived formal elements to those in which a
more definite thought is encoded: abstract painting and photography; pure
instrumental music; abstract dance; architecture; depictive painting and
photography; sculpture; realistic narrative literature; movies. More useful
perhaps are Dewey’s identifications of the representational potentials of
different media of art, that is, of the kinds of subject matters about which
thought is most naturally invited by works in different media. As Dewey has
it, architecture presents thoughts about human affairs; sculpture about
movement arrested and about repose, balance, and peace; painting about
spectacle, view, and the“look”of things (including abstract things); music
about changes, events, effects,“stir, agitation, movement, the particulars(^14) Kendall Walton,Mimesis as Make-Believe: On the Foundations of the Representational Arts
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), p. 56.
30 An Introduction to the Philosophy of Art