Practice question · Select all that apply
Which respects does the language analogy genuinely capture?
Hints
- Three are the respects in which the analogy earns its place; one is what the analogy gets wrong.
- If paraphrase were lossless, art history would be a translation exercise.
Show the answer
- A. Images use conventions that must be learned
- C. Images are culturally specific and can become opaque over time
- D. Arrangement carries meaning independently of the elements arranged
Why
The fourth is what the analogy must not be taken to imply. If a picture could be exhaustively paraphrased, the description could replace looking, and everyone who has read a good description of a painting they later saw knows that it cannot. The metaphor should be dropped precisely at that point.
Practise Is Art a Language?
The app has 4 more questions on this lesson, and keeps your place in the course. Art History I is free to start.
More questions on Is Art a Language?
- Why does Goodman conclude that painting cannot be a notation?
- Sort each art by whether it is AUTOGRAPHIC or ALLOGRAPHIC in Goodman's sense.
- An image can express negation as directly as a sentence can.
- Complete the vocabulary of the lesson.
- How many modes of reference does Peirce's trichotomy distinguish?
- Match each mode of reference to how it works.
- If art functions strictly as an allographic language, what follows for the art historian confronted with a…
- Arrange these steps of asking how an image refers, in the order they are useful.
- A halo conveys sanctity by resemblance rather than by convention.