1. Vision, the visual and art Professor Rob Hopkins Department of Philosophy, University of Sheffield

2. Some arts are visual, some not. What’s the difference?

3. What is it for an art to be visual? And what difference does this make to our engagement with those arts?

4. Painting is a visual art, if anything is. What is visual about painting, then?

5. The answer can’t be that we use vision to understand painting. For that is also true of literature, and that’s not visual. To find the answer, we need to dig deeper: what is vision? What makes an experience count as visual, as opposed to tactual, auditory…or one not tied to any of the five senses?

6. The answer lies in the way vision represents the world. 03/06/2015© The University of Sheffield 6

7. Vision represents many points around us all at once. It represents them by their relation to a point that is not itself seen – the point of view. Points in the environment are captured as in various ways separated from the point of view: over there, to the left, a certain distance away, and so on.

8. Just the same is true of pictures. They represent many points in the scenes they depict. And they represent them as separated in various ways from a point that is not itself depicted – the ‘point of view’ of the picture itself.

9. In contrast, when we perceive something in touch, the situation is very different. We are sometimes aware of many points on the felt object. But we are so only by also being aware of many points on our own body.

10. 03/06/2015© The University of Sheffield 10 For each point on the object we feel, we also feel a point on ourselves – the point that is in contact with it. And we experience each point felt, not as separated from points on the body, but as in the same place as them.

11. So much for sight and touch. Let’s go back to the arts. We understand paintings by seeing them. So we see many points on the picture as separated in various ways, from our point of view.

12. But the picture itself captures locations in the depicted scene as separated in various ways from a point in the world of the picture (though not a point visible in the picture itself).

13. This is the deep connection between pictures and vision: they represent their worlds in the same way. Pictures share the structure of seeing itself.

14. Compare sculpture. Does that present its objects from a point within the sculpted scene?

15. A hard question! The answer will show whether sculpture is a visual art in the way painting is. Perhaps, as many have thought, sculpture is instead – or also – tactual. Or perhaps it appeals to many senses, and is specially tied to none.

16. Why does any of this matter? First, because the fact that painting is a visual art seems important to what is valuable about it, what it offers us to appreciate.

17. And second, because these days we are encouraged to think that ‘visual culture’ is omnipresent and important. But we don’t even know what this means until we get clear about what the ‘visual’ is.

18. For further information, please contact: Prof Rob Hopkins Department of Philosophy University of Sheffield 45 Victoria Street S3 7QB r.hopkins@sheffield.ac.uk