and contingencies of existence”; literature about common life and vernacular
culture.^15 These representational potentials are natural tendencies to present
a certain kind of subject matter, not fixed absolutes. Their realizations are
matters of degree. They can be overridden, in that there can be, for example,
agitated sculpture or“abstract”literature (as in Robbe-Grillet or certain
works of Samuel Beckett’s). But the deep point underlying Dewey’s identifi-
cations is that without some presentation of a subject matter as a focus for
thought fused to perceptual experience the status of a work as art is reason-
ably subject to doubt.
This fact, however, does not yield a definition of art that fully enables
either the identification of works or the elucidation of art’s functions. It is
only one criterion of art. Many ordinary linguistic and visual representations
are largely“transparent,”in that they serve principally to communicate
information that might be put otherwise without significant loss of content
or function. In them, the representation itself is not centrally part of the
intended focus of attention. In art, in contrast, the material vehicle of
the representationisalso normally a focus of attention, with thehowof the
presentation mattering along with what is presented. (The German language
usefully has“Dichtung”—literarily“thickening”—as the term to describe
distinctively poetic composition.) Yet it is unclear exactly what the phrase
“presentation of a subject matter as a focus for thought fused to perceptual
experience”means. It is unclear how such presentations are achieved, and it is
unclear how and why they matter, over and above the normal function of
communicating information that is discharged by most representations.
Why do we and should we, in the case of art, pay attention also to the
representation itself and not only to what it presents as a focus for thought?
How can artistic representations, which must involve something more than
simply the conventional use of a fully arbitrary code, be achieved?
Visual depiction, resemblance, and game-playing
Answers to these questions seem most immediately available in the case of
visual representation, ordepiction. Here debate has focused onresemblance
versusconventionas the central means of achieving visual representation.
Dominic M. McIver Lopes nicely summarizes the competing intuitions that
(^15) Dewey,Art as Experience, pp. 228–40; the passage cited about music is from p. 236.
Representation, imitation, and resemblance 31