"Reading Art?" Mieke Bal

To me one of the best examples of showing off the new ideas that reading art brings about is this picture of a pipe tilted The Treachery of Images", with "Ceci n'est pas une pipe" (This is not a pipe) written across the bottom in French by Rene Magritte . Rene is asking us to look at objects and in specific painting in a new way . In linguistics it would be called the thick and thin definitions. To look at objects in a different way, we all say that this is a painting of a pipe , but we can not hold it in our hands , fill in with tobacco and smoke it .


To take a reading of Art even further we could say that we never really know that the real painting exists. We can assume that it exists somewhere in some way , but until we are standing in front of it in a museum all we can know this is this and other digitized version.



Another piece of art that makes us question the way we look at things is ' one and three chairs " by Joseph Kosuth . Here a chair is juxtaposed against a picture of a chair and than the definition of a chair .This representation highlights the relationship between referent , and the language and picture that we chose to represent it . In semiotics this would be the denotative and connotative meaning of the chair .