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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 March 2021
Art is generative by nature, revealing and concealing our intentions and identities. Form, by which we mean embodied content, has a unique relationship with each viewer, reader, or listener of call and response, and that is why the meaning of a work of art cannot be easily fixed or guaranteed. Art is a form of life.
The valence of a work of art is experienced over time. Even in works of art that fail to reach an impact many of us would consider profound, meaning can’t be grasped in a glance or a moment of listening. Meaning in art often accrues by degrees as the world of the art’s embodied content meets us in what we see, touch, hear, smell, and taste. And the world that art creates is formed through an act of poesis (from the Greek for to make), with intention, but not with a means to stabilize meaning(s) in its encounters with viewers over time, in some cases, millennia. As a form of life, works of art may have not just histories but also biographies (extended narrative lives), and sometimes works of art die when they disappear from public view or consciousness.
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