The artwork picture looks like a picture but doesn’t discharge pictorial functions as we would, in a different setting, expect….
The artwork picture looks like a picture but doesn’t discharge pictorial functions as we would, in a different setting, expect. I don’t mean, when I say this, that art always startles or agitates or shocks. That would be avant-garde-ist or modernist in a parochial way. But that is not the view. Paintings and other pictorial works of art stand to the background place of picture-making in our lives in something like the way that irony stands to straight-talk (…). They are different, but each presupposes the other.
Alva Noë. 2023. The Entanglement: How Art and Philosophy Make Us What We Are. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.