Symbol and Meaning

A widespread scholarly notion specifies that symbols are if not a sufficient condition of art, are a necessary condition. Today,  in common usage, the term symbol refers to an object associated with and serving to identify something (Roget's II 1988). A symbol, for example, can consist of colors, sounds, gestures, or visual images. Symbols are similar to signs in that both serve to communicate a message. Signs, however, serve as a marker for something specific  and often simple - such as a road sign indicating that the drive should stop,  A symbol, on the other hand, is said to represent something more complex and open to interpretation.  

Even though symbols are open to interpretation, the meaning of a symbol is often public. As art critic and philosopher George Dickie (1971: 121) explained, "the interpretation of symbols in paintings and literature is a public matter. Symbols such as halos have a conventional public or social meaning similar to the way in which words have public meanings." The meaning of a symbol is learned from other people, presumably through their speech. 

Some writers argue or imply that symbolism is perhaps a sufficient condition for art. Mithen (1999), for example, argues that art originated in large-brained humans who had developed the capacity to make and understand symbols. Green (1947z: 308) explained that "it is almost universally agred that if a composition in any medium deserves to be called a "work of art' it has some meaning" As Boas (1955:88) explained, however, "Not all societies have art that is meaningful or has associative connotations." Dissanayake (1992:90) writes that the "existence of non-symbolic designs and patterns in human societies suggests that making art is not in any causal or inevitable way dependent on  image making or symbolizing." Even "western art, Otten (1971:x) argued, "only partially and sporadically  carries this freight of prescribed symbolic meaning. Many objects, even natural objects, can become symbolic as they have “meaning.” We associate a certain place or event that occurred at that place or at that time. To some degree animals understand signs, if not symbols - the sound of a can opener can signify food or it is time to eat.  

Discussions of symbol and meaning often fail to address how the meaning of a symbol is actually transmitted between individuals; how, when it is social, individuals come to agree that it represents a particular thing. It becomes public. While researchers often agree that “common knowledge is a prerequisite to the functioning of the symbols” (Binford 1971:16), they seem to assume that the meaning of a symbol is in some as yet unspecified way transmitted from one human brain to another (Coe 1992). Or, perhaps viewers at a "preconscious or even unconscious level" recognize, through participation in a collective unconscious, a particular shape as a symbol of their "deepest aesthetic feeling" (Vinnicombe 1976: 350). However, unless humans read each other's minds or have a template in their brains that influences a response to a particular symbol, a symbol’s meaning implies an identified and remembered association with its referent (Coe 1992). The memory of this association is crucial to the meaning of any symbol; indeed, this association appears to constitute the meaning of a symbol. Meaning, in other words, is learned and to the extent its meaning it is shared, it is learned from others presumably through their behavior (speech and actions).

To omit meaning from the definition does not imply that art is meaningless; the omission rather suggests that before we can increase our knowledge of what is undone to art, we must separate art from any message to which it calls attention. It is perhaps for these reasons that Boas (1955:13) argued that a focus on symbols could obscure our study of art. Within a society, he mused, “there can be…considerable wavering about the meaning of a symbol” (p. 102); "in the designs of the Californian Indians, the same form will be called by different people or even by the same people at different times, now a lizard's foot, then a mountain covered with trees, then again an owl's claw."

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