ABSTRACT
A central dilemma of aesthetic visual communication is whether visual images can provide reliable evidence of important human cognitive activity and potentially meaningful affective responses or whether an image’s communicative value is wholly dependent on what can be said about it; this would include discursive logic, applied subjectively, by each individual viewer. Is there communication if you can’t seem to “put it into words”? Does the nature of visual information transmission, its accurate interpretation, and the meaningful importance of an image reside only in the subjective (inside the subject’s head) processes of each individual viewer? Can there be a base of objective (based in a physical object) information on which multiple viewers can agree? Both the image-maker and all subsequent viewers must somehow have confidence in their ability to understand a level of meaning embedded in the image. If, as the subjective view holds, all interpretation is only a fanciful construction in the mind of each individual, how can any viewer judge the quality, precise meaning, and utility of the communication?
