ABSTRACT
The balance between the contribution made by our eyes and that made by the thinking part of our minds has changed across the history of art. Januszczak could mean a number of different things by his claim. It is important, in thinking about these matters, to distinguish between these claims as some of them are more plausible than others. The idea of art developing so that one way of doing art (be it a technique or a medium) replaces another can be found in attempts to provide a theoretical basis for modernism. Danto puts it in the quotation above, 'we still have to infer movement, and once it is decided that this is something we want instead to show, the inherent limitations of the medium become obstacles'. The saturation thesis claims that the possibilities of painting have been exhausted. The claim has been made about tonal music.
