In tutti i sensi. La comunicazione dell'opera d'arte

Sensory experience supplies the perceptual equivalents of all theoretical notion because such notions derive from sensory experience in the first place. Arnheim maintains that thinking cannot go beyond the models that are offered by the human senses. Artistically speaking, the most productive senses are sight and hearing.. Artistic communication has the peculiarity of overlapping signified and signifier: the channel merges with the signified. Artistic creation is silent, as creation is. If one talks about a painting, explaining why one like it or not, metacognition comes into play: one talks’ about art’; one talks about the communication, already occurred, through a symbolic system which differs from the linguistic (pictorial, musical, architectural etc.). It seem therefore interesting to analyse how the artist and the user participate in communication and, in particular, how users actuate or can actuate reception. Sociology of art based mainly on the fact that art cannot be defined in relation only to its products: art is an ‘object de civilisation’ and, because of this, it can said that groups of individuals associated in institutions have contributed to the development of society and that art can materialise a representational and operational order starting from a selection of data from the senses. Art is a social fact and, as such, it explains something about society that could not be explained in other ways.