As a sort of thought experiment, pretend you had no idea what art – visual art – might be, and you tried to formulate some concept of it by reading "A Guide to Evidence-Based Art.” You would certainly come away with at least one salient idea, that visual art has content. The list of features that are most often repeated and specified in the field are described as “art content.” This conception tellingly passes over a middle term, that of the image. Artwork contains images, and those images may be pictures, depictions of persons, places, or things. Or they may not. To put it simply, visual art may be “representational” or “abstract.”
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I recently attended the annual meeting of the National Organization of Arts and Health (NOAH) which was very illuminating, and for my interests, very helpful for understanding the larger contexts of the subjects I’m pursuing here: visual art, health, and design. I’m sure I will have more to say about those contexts later, but first a note about what we mean when we talk about art.
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