In favour of the view, it is undeniable that many works of art are about the world in somewhat the way that language may be about the world. This is evident in the case of literature (which is itself an instance of natural language). It is no less evident in the case of painting. A portrait stands to its sitter in a relation that is not unlike that which obtains between a description and the thing described. Even if the majority of pictures are of, or about, entirely imaginary people, scenes, and episodes, this is no different from the case of literature, in which language is used to describe purely imaginary subjects. This relation between a work of art and its subject, captured in the word about, is sometimes called representation—a term that owes its currency in aesthetics to Croce and Collingwood, who used it to draw the familiar contrast between representation and expression.
The concept of expression is variously analyzed. Its principal function in modern aesthetics, however, is to describe those aspects and dimensions of artistic meaning that seem not to fall within the bounds of representation, either because they involve no clear reference to an independent subject matter or because the connection between the subject and the artistic form is too close and inextricable to admit description in the terms appropriate to representation. Therefore, it is widely recognized that abstract (i.e., nonrepresentational) art forms—music, abstract painting, architecture—may yet contain meaningful utterances, and most frequently philosophers and critics use terms such as expression in order to describe these elusive meanings. Music, in particular, is often said to be an expression of emotion and to gain much of its significance from that. Expression in such a case is unlike representation, according to many philosophers, in that it involves no descriptive component. An expression of grief does not describe grief but rather presents it, as it might be presented by a face or a gesture.
Expression must be distinguished from evocation. To say that a piece of music expresses melancholy is not to say that it evokes (arouses) melancholy. To describe a piece of music as expressive of melancholy is to give a reason for listening to it; to describe it as arousing melancholy is to give a reason for avoiding it. (Music that is utterly blank expresses nothing, but it may arouse melancholy.) Expression, where it exists, is integral to the aesthetic character and merit of whatever possesses it. For similar reasons, expression must not be confused with association, in spite of the reliance on the confusion by many 18th-century empiricists.
The distinction between representation and expression is one of the most important conceptual devices in contemporary philosophy of art. Croce, who introduced it, sought to dismiss representation as aesthetically irrelevant and to elevate expression into the single, true aesthetic function. The first, he argued, is descriptive, or conceptual, concerned with classifying objects according to their common properties, and so done to satisfy our curiosity. The second, by contrast, is intuitive, concerned with presenting its subject matter (an “intuition”) in its immediate concrete reality, so that we see it as it is in itself. In understanding expression, our attitude passes from mere curiosity to that immediate awareness of the concrete particular that is the core of aesthetic experience. Symbolism in art
Later philosophers have been content merely to distinguish representation and expression as different modes of artistic meaning, characterized perhaps by different formal or semantic properties. Nelson Goodman of the United States is one such philosopher. His Languages of Art (1968) was the first work of analytical philosophy to produce a distinct and systematic theory of art. Goodman’s theory has attracted considerable attention, the more so in that it is an extension of a general philosophical perspective, expounded in works of great rigour and finesse, that embraces the entire realm of logic, metaphysics, and the philosophy of science.
Goodman, like many others, seeks the nature of art in symbolism and the nature of symbolism in a general theory of signs. (This second part of Goodman’s aim is what Ferdinand de Saussure called semiology, the general science of signs [Cours de linguistique générale, 1916; Course of General Linguistics]). The theory derives from the uncompromising nominalism expounded in Goodman’s earlier works, a nominalism developed under the influence of two other American philosophers, the German-born Rudolf Carnap and W.V.O. Quine, but also showing certain affinities with the later philosophy of Wittgenstein. According to Goodman’s general theory of signs, the relation between signs and the world can be described, like any relation, in terms of its formal structure, the objects related, and its genealogy. But, apart from that formal and factual analysis, there is nothing to be said. Words are labels that we attach to things, but the attempt to justify that practice merely repeats it: in using words, it presupposes precisely the justification that it aims to provide.
A corollary of this view is that relations of identical logical structure and identical genealogy between relevantly similar terms are really one and the same relation. Thus, if we assume that paintings, like words, are signs, then portraits stand to their subjects in the same relation as proper names to the objects denoted by them. (This is the substance of Goodman’s proof that representation is a species of denotation.) We should not worry if that leads us to no new understanding of the relation (e.g., if it leads to no procedure for decoding the painted sign), for Goodman believes the search for such a procedure is incoherent. The meaning of a sign is simply given, along with the artistic practice that creates it.
Goodman proceeds to generalize his theory of symbolism, using the word reference to express the relation between word and thing. (We might well characterize this relation as labelling.) Denotation is the special case of reference exemplified by proper names and portraits—a case in which a symbol labels one individual. When a single label picks out many things, then we have not a name but a predicate.
Sometimes the process of labelling goes both ways. A colour sample is a sign for the colour it possesses—say, the colour red. It therefore refers to the label red, which in turn refers back to the sample. In this case, the predicate red and the sample mutually label each other. Goodman calls this relation exemplification and analyzes expression as a special case of it—namely, the case where the exemplification of a predicate proceeds by metaphor. For example, a piece of music may refer to sadness; it may also be metaphorically sad. In this case, Goodman argues, we may speak of the music as expressing sadness.
The economy and elegance of Goodman’s theory are matched by its extreme inscrutability. On the surface it seems to provide direct and intelligible answers to all the major problems of art. What is art? A system of symbols. What is representation? Denotation. What is expression? A kind of reference. What is the value of art? It symbolizes (displays) reality. What is the distinction between art and science? A distinction between symbol systems but not between the matters they display. Yet, at each point we feel at a loss to know what we are learning about art in being told that it is essentially symbolic.