ABSTRACT
Semiotics, from the Greek word sema (meaning “sign”), is the application of the science of signs (semiology). It assumes that cultures and cultural expressions such as language, art, music, and film are composed of signs, and that each sign has a meaning beyond, and only beyond, its literal self.1 “The core of semiotic theory,” according to Mieke Bal and Norman Bryson in 1991, “is the definition of the factors involved in this permanent process of signmaking and interpreting and the development of conceptual tools that help us to grasp that process as it goes on in various arenas of cultural activity.”2 Although sign theories are not new, their systematic application to the visual arts developed from the work of the American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce (1834-1914) and the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913) in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Semiotics includes Structuralism, Post-Structuralism, and Deconstruction (Chapter 8), all of which have been applied to art.
