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 is not capable of telling a story in the way that a novel is, 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, one knife-edge of time, 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 (1729–81) 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. Differences in the arts related to mediums
Very significant differences among the arts occur because of the differences in their mediums: Literary and nonliterary
The greatest difference among the arts is between the literary and the nonliterary. Literature consists of a system of symbols with assigned meanings. A word is not simply a noise (or a mark on a printed page); a word is a noise or a printed mark with an assigned meaning. In different languages, different noises have been assigned meanings, and the language must be learned in order to understand what is being said. To appreciate the work of the 11th-century novelist Murasaki Shikibu, one must learn Japanese; to fully appreciate Molière, the 17th-century playwright, one must learn French. No other art has this problem: the English can appreciate German music as well as the Germans—or, if they do not, it is not for lack of learning a language.
Shapes, colours, and tones do not have assigned meanings. That is not to say that these elements when present in art cannot be said to have some sense of the term meaning. There are many meanings of the word meaning, and a colour, for example, can have meaning in that it may symbolize something, as red symbolizes courage, or it may have strong emotional or other effects upon the viewer, evoking all manner of strong associations. But a colour or a tone has no assigned meaning. If the question were asked, “What does middle C mean?”, the answer would be, “It has no assigned meaning at all; in that sense, it means nothing—it just has certain effects.” But if the meaning of a certain word in a poem is not known, the reader is to that extent prevented from appreciating the poem, for the medium of poetry is not noises, not printed marks, but words, and the difference between a noise and a word lies in the fact that a word is a noise with a meaning.
This fact makes for an enormous difference between literature and the other arts. A colour in a painting may be the colour of an object represented. A colour may even “mean” something; for example, the white of a white flag that a person depicted in a battle painting is holding up as a sign of surrender. But a colour, as a colour, has no meaning at all, and the same is true of musical tones. A pattern of musical tones may occasionally acquire a meaning (the first four tones of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony were used to symbolize victory in World War II), but when this happens it really has very little to do with the music, and in any case most music is appreciated without any such symbolism being present. But a noise, however pleasing to the ear, is only a noise and not a word unless it has an assigned meaning, and one must know what that meaning is in order to appreciate a poem or any other work of literature. The translation problem