XI—Artspeak (Or: What Dorothea Learned in Rome)

Abstract A familiar experience when engaging with art is that of being in the presence of profundity but finding oneself unable to articulate that profundity to one’s own satisfaction. To make sense of this, I propose a novel kind of deep content in art, ostensive content, which consists in that to which our non-perceptual attention non-accidentally falls through the use of the art object as an ostensive device. Deep content in art is not encoded by representation vehicles on the surface of the art object; it is that to which our attentional gaze falls when we engage well with the artwork.