ABSTRACT
The artist's medium is better thought of not as a medium of communication but as a medium of expression or representation. It follows that artistic works should not in general be thought of as 'making statements' or 'bearing messages' which need decoding, though some artists may indeed conceive their work in these terms and require this kind of response. A useful distinction has been drawn by philosophers and linguists between communication and information. In a slogan: no communication without an intention to communicate. Despite the slogan, the topic is a complex one, and the nature of the intention to communicate and the dependence or independence of what is communicated on the intention to communicate it has been extensively debated. The slogan, 'No communication without an intention to communicate', can be paralleled by another possible slogan, 'No art without an intention to make art'.
