Dr Dairai Darlington Dziwa
Section Collection Information
Semiotics of art provides a framework for understanding how humans create meaning associated with the visual world around them. Semiotics of art is underpinned on the assumption that visual signs do not convey only a meaning that is inherent to the entity being represented, but also to the perceptions of the artists and the reader-viewers. Thus semiotic analysis identifies some of the factors involved in the process of sign making and interpreting, and it develops conceptual tools that help us to grasp that process as it goes on in various areas of cultural activity. Semiotic analysis acknowledges the reflexive position, or role, of the individual artist or reader-viewer in terms of paradox of fixed or unitary or universal meaning of a work of art. Work of art, refers to both artefacts or material objects and primarily a mental entity, or conception of a signifying process, whose realization can also include an artifact. Central to semiotic analysis is the recognition of how visual and material culture is coded; the social conventions which link signs with meanings. There are at the moment roughly four trending analyses in the semiotics of art: (1) art as representation (pictorial image), the analysis of which deals with issues of iconicity, problems of representation, iconography, etc., and the identification of constituents of meaning (subject matter and content of the work); (2) code theory and the language of art, which enters into the debate regarding whether art is a language and whether a linguistic model is applicable to a semiotic analysis of a work of art; (3) semiotic analysis of the functions of art, where aesthetic function is connected with aesthetic value and is seen as a constitutive element of a work of art; and (4) integral analysis of artistic culture, which aims to examine the entire aggregate of sign systems as united by culture, to ascertain their number, their hierarchy, their mutual influence, or their functional correlation.
Dr Dairai Darlington Dziwa
Section Editor