According to Roland Barthes “what makes writing the opposite of speech is that the former always appears symbolical, introverted, ostensibly turned towards an occult side of language, whereas the second is nothing but a flow of empty signs, the movement of which alone is significant.” (20) Thus he maintains the traditional separation of closed high art and popular culture as an extension of Saussure’s terms language and speech. The proponents of visual art as a closed form, a type of classified information, also suppose irreconcilable levels. To use a statement of Rothko’s, one that has become a cliché: “A picture lives by companionship, expanding and quickening in the eyes of the sensitive observer. It dies by the same token. It is, therefore, a risky and unfeeling act to send it out into the world.” (21) This view of art, highly estheticizing, but also snobbish, rests on the assumption that a painting processes a deep singular meaning and that correct reception consists of identifying it. The history of taste and the study of human communication does not suggest such perfect matching as plausible occurrence. Though art may be a private act in its origins, this is not we can be expected to see as art becomes part of a system of public information. Art is a public system to which we, as spectators or consumers, have random access.

A work of art consists of at least two levels of information: one that can be translated into other media for reproduction, or that other artists can use, and one that is identified solely with the original channel. (22) Any work of art contains both special channel characteristics (unique) and transmissible information (repeatable). The stratification is not mechanically arrived at, but is a consequence of the interaction of the artist’s intention and the spectator’s interpretation. One may be more interested in the unique component than the other, but to restrict the work’s meaning solely to that is restrictive. In addition, it goes against all one’s experience of art to presume that exhausted interpretation is possible. A consequence of the incorporation of art into the fine art-pop art continuum is that the variable responses inevitably evoked by art have been made more fully visible.

This saturation by information, though new in its scale and intensity, has ample historical roots, of which I shall mention two. To quote Karl Mannheim: “the educated no longer constitute a caste or compact rank, but an open stratum.” (23) Linked to this is Mannheim’s observation that sophistication is no longer a”an adjunct of status and breeding.” (24) Thus the criteria for sophistication are separated from a required level of stored knowledge in certain areas and become a reflex of topical orientation. This is a form of knowledge, of course, but adaptive rather than normative. The fine art-pop art continuum, a disordered realm to orthodox humanists and formalists, is a gymnasium for the development of this sophistication without depth that is characteristic of much of the attention that the public brings to art. Its flexibility is preferable to dogmatic avowals of singular meaning and absolute standards. At least it does not reduce one’s continued exposure to changing configurations by narrowly set prior standards. When the occasions for viewing art were restricted and the spectators were few in numbers and socially uniform, there were agreed-on limits of response and interpretation. Now that art is seen in wildly differing contexts, the diversity of response to art is public too. For this reason it seems that the notion of esoteric art and everyday life in opposition needs to be modified to allow for art’s presence in the quotidian realm.

Protectiveness toward original works of art with their aura of uniqueness, derives from a notion of art as the maximized handmade object. Writing in the late ’50s, surrounded by Abstract Expressionists, Meyer Schapiro even referred to free handling “as a means of affirming the individual.” (25) Intoxicated by autographic he contrasted Abstract Expressionists with Leger’s regard for the reproducible products of technology, “but the experiences of the last 25 years have made such confidence in the vision of technology less interesting and even distasteful.” (26) This is like blaming crime in the streets on a TV program, but the fallacy is still common, though now expressed by a new generation of naturists reacting against industrial pollution and American militarism instead of World War II and memories of the Nazis. It is presumed that aura is lessoned when art is reproduce mechanically. Some properties show up more than others in reproduction it is true: autographic solidity is lightened and connections with other artists and the rest of the world are facilitated, but these are nondestructive emphases. It is not possible to restrict the meaning of a work to its literal presence; art consists of ideas as well as objects.