There is plenty of other notes and possible prefaces and explanations I could write out to supplement this, but for now I am posting the result plain and simple to avoid getting caught up in paragraphs.
I also have lost the reason as to why I created this structure (what to call it?), but it has become a sort of basic organizational flow/chart for practical purposes. It really isn't a concept or anything new.
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On the topic of image creation, interpretation, and results of art (by that I mean when an art is "successful" or a "failure", in context of viewer involvement and presentation).
A general example: Someone wants to express their childhood traumas in relation to their family, and paints a family portrait. They wish for the viewer to spot something "off" about it and feel an emotional or intellectual sensation of horror.
The operation is made of two parts: (1) ostensive visual cues (2) common contextual information; and by way of a combination of the two, results in a conclusion that shall be "put through" or "taken from" the art.
Ostensive visual cues are the literal things inside of the artwork's image, or are part of the artwork's material or construction, or some other location that deals with the artwork as a work.
In this case, the visual cues could be, for instance, that the family is painted in a pose where they are simultaneously distant and awkward, but touching in a strange manner. It can also be a general tone of strangeness, coldness, awkwardness, stiffness, and so on and so forth (the "vibe").
Common contextual information (or 'common context info') are pieces of information or frameworks of knowledge held by the current viewers and artist. Most likely this does not really include information known about the artist, but instead "common sense", at least the common sense of an art-knowing individual. This can include the current cultural sentiments, current mainstream opinions, historical backgrounds; both in regards to art as well as general topics.
In this case, the common context info could be current-day knowledges of trauma, or the effects of trauma studies in the intellectual viewer, and the general consensus on childhood experiences, family expectations, and photo etiquette, trends, and norms. It would also include the canon of art history, specifically in regards to portraiture.
The result of this combination is that, for instance, the viewer looks at the work and picks up on the visual cues, they spot the stiffness, the touching, the dark vibe... The viewer, aware that they are likely looking at a family portrait, combines this observation with the fact that family portraits should look a certain way, and that families should be a certain way, and realize their observation does not align with this. A sense of horror creeps in, or they at least assume it should, and so on and so forth...
In a present-tense, active scenario: The combination of ostensive visual clues and common context info is what the artist is self-aware of, means for, and hopes the viewer to get (in any manner that can occur). It is then what the viewer picks up (or can pick up, if successful).
(It should be noted that the expectation isn't for someone to read the entire operation and "get" all of it, but that at least some part of it should result in the general viewing population, and a part should certainly result in the intellectual-interpreting critical population.)
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The following sections are speculative and I'm not confident in terms of how much sense they make, as I typed it in a daze:
Using this structure, 'less interesting' art that often gets criticized for being too straightforward or too 'easy' fail for the lack of differences, conflicts, or meaningful associations in the combination of items (1) and (2).
An example can immediately be assumed to be, for instance, of a beautiful landscape. However, with this example I argue it isn't as easy to become uninteresting as one would think. E.g.:
An artist wants to represent a beautiful mountain view he saw, so he paints a realistic depiction of it.
The ostensive visual clues of this artwork is the realistic style, the fact that its an evident landscape, the beautiful method of painting, the skill of the painting, and etc. The common context info includes the entire history of landscapes, especially their status (at times or places) of being a highly accepted art form but varying in perceived complexity (at times portraiture was valued more, at times it wasn't, etc.). It would also include, due to the history of art, the highly accepted nature of realistic painting styles.
Therefore, is the landscape not boring? There is no tension in the combination of its cues and context. But I have purposefully left out another piece of context: In the year of 2025, you could depict a landscape with a photograph.
There is tension now, as the artist is going against the idea of a practical solution 'why don't you just take a photo if you want to realistically depict it?'
But this tension is actually not so deep. It is present in many more works of art, or could even be present as a topic of 'why make art at all?', which is so general it may as well apply itself to every little corner of art.
The real tension is in the past mentioned facts, as well as another point: in the year of 2025 art takes on many different forms (by this I mean the same sense that causes people to say 'anything goes nowadays!') and there is always an obsession with pushing boundaries and for 'newness' in various fields, art included. So now, you could ask the artist 'why don't you just make a conceptual work if you want to make something significant?'
But if this attitude is now part of the present-day common context info, and the artist is directly going against it, is this not another source of tension?
And while this tension is still might less dramatic than other examples we could think of, the multiple instances of it, albeit mild, layer onto each other and create an interesting sandwich-style combination.
It is not to say that something needs to be more interesting than the next object (although can we assume across the board, a proper 'interesting' thing has merit?), and it especially doesn't need to by way of this structure. It is not meant to be a formula.
The more examples I plug in, and the more I think on them (I have lost my words so I ceased my typing), the result is very accommodating yet anticlimactic. Essentially, putting aside how the revolutionaries and avant-gardes and rebellious and boundary-pushing people do truly cause innovation, perhaps art lives on in some trudging manner by constantly creating little conclusion sandwiches of various interesting tensions.
In a less dramatic manner, this trudging effect is seen in the interpretation and understanding of artists in history, with the large focus on biographical facts and environmental contexts necessary to 'fully understand' the work. One paints a landscape, and we do not see the visual cues of the artist's internal troubles until we know of them years later (which is the cue and which is the context? Is the context that no one knew at the time, or is the context the troubles themselves? This hints that the structure is either less strict than is thought, or that things just get muddy quite quickly). And then more and more context builds from the progression of time and fields of art history, theory, and just about everything else. It doesn't build and build on top of each other, as if an additive process or necessarily improving/upwards(/any direction), but keeps rotating and shifting and trudging along... perhaps...
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Can this order of operation be seen elsewhere? How about understanding and 'realizations' themselves, e.g. if we take the artist from earlier, how did they understand their family to be "off"?
(1) The ostensive visual cues could be the actual experiences had by the individual, without any interpretation.
(2) The common context info could be the same facts about how a family should be, which the individual might have only learned in full later on.
Thus the combination of the two results in a conclusion that something about their experience was deeply wrong. If they look at old family photos (which seems to want to exist in the same form as ostensive visual cues), and combine it with the common context info, the full understanding, conclusion, or realization had dramatically changes the photos, and we would not say that viewing the photos naively as 'normal' would be correct, we would say they were mistaken or misled, and that the new horrible understanding is the correct one.
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