The Aesthetic Value of Representation in Painting

The philosophy of art was born with Plato's challenge to demonstrate the value of representational art. Two and a half millenia later it is questionable at best whether aestheticians have met that challenge. This article will contain a brief review of some attempts to do so and the suggestion of a different direction from which to approach the problem. Pictorial representation is of a less and more common variety, the first being symbolism and the second depiction. I shall touch on the value of pictorial symbolism at the end of this discussion, but our main concern is with depiction or picturing proper. Plato himself suggested a criterion for a painting's being a depiction, as well as a criterion for its depicting a particular object, when he held that painters imitate the appearances of objects. I The suggested criterion is that a painted surface represents an object when it realizes the intention of the painter to make the perceptual experience of it resemble the appearance of the object. The problem of specifying the value of such representations results from this conception of what it is to pictorially represent or depict. If a depiction is a mere imitation of an appearance, if it is intended to produce experience that resembles only the way an object looks, then how can it have any value not possessed in greater degree by the object itself or the experience of it

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