Art and Ambiguity

Abstract

Ambiguity occurs in various art forms: in literature, in music and in the visual arts. In this article we focus on ambiguity in the visual arts. We distinguish ambiguity from other related perceptual possibilities such as indeterminacy, paradoxicality and anamorphism. Ambiguous works are shown to be a powerful challenge to two traditional theories concerning the identity of artworks: (1) The subjectivist view that the work is identical with the viewer's experience; and (2) The identification of artworks with material objects. The relevance of some recent studies in the philosophy of art and in artificial intelligence is discussed and, finally, the implications of visual ambiguity for aesthetic evaluation are considered. Ambiguity occurs recognizably in various art forms: in literature, in music and in the visual arts. Interestingly divergent views have been expressed concerning the aesthetic value, or disvalue, of ambiguity in art. Thus Monroe Beardsley, discussing 'qualities of style' in literature, notes: 'Bad style, as critics discuss it, might then be tentatively described in these terms: the diction and syntax of a discourse are such as to produce an incoherence between the primary and secondary levels of meaning, or such as to produce ambiguity or obscurity

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 14 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.