Practice question · Multiple choice
Why does Goodman conclude that painting cannot be a notation?
Hints
- A notation needs to settle definitively whether two marks are the same character.
- Consider whether you can say where one shade stops and the next begins.
Show the answer
B. Between any two shades there is another, so its characters are not disjoint and differentiated
Why
Because painting is a dense symbol system. A notation requires characters you can tell apart definitively, this is an A or it is not, and between any two shades of a painting there is another shade. Density is exactly what a notation excludes, which is why a musical score can be a notation and a canvas cannot.
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?
- 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.
- Which respects does the language analogy genuinely capture?
- 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.