The mediums of art
In the context of every work of art there are three items to consider:
1. The genesis of the work of art.
2. The artifact, or work of art, which is a publicly available object or thing made by the artist and viewed by the audience.
3. The effects of the work of art upon the audience.
The first item comprises all the artist’s mental states, both conscious and unconscious, in the creation of the work, including the artist’s intention with regard to the work, as well as all the factors that led to these states of mind—for example, the spirit of the age, the socioeconomic conditions of the times, exchanges of ideas with other artists, and so forth. Whatever factors helped to form the work of art in the artist’s mind fall under this heading. The experiences undergone by the artist in the creation of the work constitute the artistic experience.
The third item includes all the effects of the work of art upon those who experience it, including both aesthetic and nonaesthetic reactions, the influence of the work of art upon the culture, on the state of knowledge, on current morality, and the like. The experience that involves the observer’s attention to the work of art for its own sake and not for the sake of some ulterior end is called aesthetic, but of course art has many effects that are not aesthetic. The aesthetic experience belongs to the consumer of art, as opposed to the artistic experience, which belongs to the creator of art.
The second item is what is usually called the work of art itself. According to some writers, such as the Italian philosopher Benedetto Croce, the work of art exists only in the mind of the artist, and the physical artifact then counts as an effect of the work of art. But in ordinary usage, as well as the usage of most philosophers of art, the work of art is identified with the physical artifact, as it exists in the physical medium. What goes on in the creator’s mind is already contained in the first item.
Every work of art occurs in a medium; that is, there is some physical object or series of events by which the work is communicated to the recipient (listener, observer, reader) by means of the senses. In painting, the medium is paint; in sculpture, such materials as stone or wood or plastic. It might at first be thought that the medium of music consists of the musical score on which the composer writes the notes, but the written notes are not music; they are a set of visual cues for the production of the tones to be emitted by the various instruments. If every player had a perfect memory, there would be no need for the written score; indeed, music existed long before there were any written scores and was played or sung from memory from one year or generation to the next. It could be said more plausibly that the medium of music consists of the physical sound waves by means of which the sound sensations enter the consciousness of the listener. The medium of literature can truly be said to be words, yet not words as abstract entities conceived in the mind but words as spoken (in oral presentation) or written. The physical medium of literature, then, is either auditory or visual, although what is conveyed through the medium is not.
Classifying arts by their mediums
There are many ways of classifying the arts—by their purpose, by their intentions, by their effects. But the most usual and the most fundamental method of classifying the arts is by their mediums:
Visual art
This includes two-dimensional visual arts such as drawing and painting and also three-dimensional visual arts such as sculpture and architecture. Some of these should doubtless be called visuo-tactual art: buildings are ordinarily touched as well as seen, sculptures could be more fully appreciated if touched as well as seen, and even paintings may sometimes have enough three-dimensionality to repay touch experience. At any rate, all these arts appeal first and foremost, though not exclusively, to the sense of sight, and the artifact is an object in the visual medium.
Auditory art
This includes music in all its forms but not song, opera, and those arts that combine music with literature (see below Mixed arts). Just as the medium of visual art is sight, so the medium of auditory art is sound.
In auditory art there is—unlike visual art—no physical object (other than the score, which as has been seen is not the music). There is only the temporally successive series of sounds: sound waves emanating from the various instruments. While no such tones are being emitted, no sounds exist; only the musical score exists (and the memories of listeners, some of whom might enable the score to be reproduced if it were lost), from which music can be reproduced. Unlike the existence of paintings and sculptures, the existence of musical sounds is intermittent. In what sense, then, does the music exist between performances? It exists only in the sense that it is reproducible from the written score.
Verbal art
The art of literature is clearly different from both visual and auditory art. There are sound values in poetry, particularly when read aloud, but literature as sound alone would be the most poverty-stricken of arts. What makes the sounds of poetry effective is (at least 99 percent) knowledge of the meanings of the words heard. Listening to the sounds of a poem or play uttered in an unfamiliar language gives some idea of the importance in literature of knowing the meanings of the words. Note that “murmuring,” one of the most pleasant sounding words in English, has almost the same sounds as “murdering.” It is almost exclusively a knowledge of word meanings that makes it possible to appreciate the art of literature.
Nor is literature a visual art, although it is customary to read works of literature from a printed page. A critic who said, “I think this poem is a bad one, because it is written in unpleasant small type in double-column pages on yellowed paper,” might be giving advice to typesetters and book designers (these two groups are engaged in the practice of visual arts) but would be saying nothing about the merits of the poem. The printed or written word or, for that matter, the spoken word is only a vehicle for the meanings. Literature, then, must be placed in a separate class from either auditory or visual arts.
Mixed arts
Other arts variously combine the above three types of arts; this group includes all the arts of performance. Drama combines the art of literature (verbal art) with the visual arts of costuming, stage designing, and so on. Opera combines the art of music (its predominant component) with the art of literature (the libretto) and the visual arts of stage design. Dance combines the visual spectacle of moving bodies (the principal component) with musical accompaniment, sometimes with accompanying words and often with stage design. Song combines words with music. Film combines the visual component (a series of pictures presented in such rapid succession that they appear to be moving) with the verbal component (the script) and usually an intermittent musical background as well.
All the visual arts are also spatial arts, or arts of space. Music and literature are both temporal arts, or arts of time. This leads to very great differences in the things each can do. In temporal arts, the parts do not appear together before the audience but appear successively in time, the second moment not beginning until the first one has finished. In spatial arts, the entire work of art is present simultaneously; attention to the parts of it is successive—it is impossible to concentrate on the whole at once, at least on first viewing—but the entire object is nevertheless there, and it is the decision of the viewer which part to examine first. In three-dimensional art, such as sculpture and architecture, the entire object is present, but it is impossible even to see (much less to look at) all of it at once: the back of a statue cannot be seen at the same moment as the front and the exterior of a cathedral cannot be viewed by someone inside it.
Temporal arts must be attended to in a certain order: it is impossible to hear the symphony played backward, or the drama, or the movie; even when technically it can be done (as in running a motion picture in reverse), the results usually are an aesthetic catastrophe. The recipient is supposed to attend to the temporal work’s various parts in an order predetermined by the artist. For this reason, painting rarely tells a story in the way that a novel does, for a story is a series of temporally successive happenings. A painting can at best take a series of represented persons and objects and show them as they exist at one moment only, or a series of moments, as in a scroll painting or fresco cycle, whereas a novel can depict the temporally successive happenings in the order of their occurrence (or in a different order, such as flashback).
The German aesthetician and dramatist Gotthold Lessing made this distinction the basis of his study Laokoon (1766), contending that the function of visual art is to create beautiful objects and that the artist should select that stance or moment at which the person or object appears most beautiful, to enable the viewer to continue looking at it with pleasure; whereas literature, being temporal, is equipped to tell a story that includes many moments other than pleasing ones (moreover, the scenes in literature are not seen with the eyes but only imagined). Lessing’s thesis that each art should restrict itself to what it can do best or is peculiarly equipped by its medium to do is a highly controversial one: it would virtually eliminate program music, for example, and descriptions of nature in novels. The tendency of art today is to attempt to curtail distinctions between time and space rather than to preserve them.
