People use art to tell narratives

The argument

People use art to depict stories from myth, legend, religion, history, and literature. These stories can vary in their content. People also use art to depict narratives about their everyday life activities. Unlike classic art, this type of art has a time dimension to describe the sequence of events in the story — it is not a single arrested moment but an account of something unfolding, which is what makes it a telling rather than a depiction. The narrative purpose of art is very important, and it is a communicative purpose before it is a decorative one. A work made to convey a story is made for someone: it presupposes a viewer who will follow the sequence and take the story from it, which is the structure of a message rather than of an ornament. Unlike reading words to understand a story, narrative art gives a more rich experience and promotes an individual's imagination of the story, as the famous saying goes: an image is worth a thousand words. A picture delivers its content at once, leaving the viewer to move through it, and much of what it conveys — expression, scale, the relation between figures — would take a great deal of text to state and would still arrive more slowly. Visuals are also easier to remember for people, which helps them retain the story, and retention is what a communicated story requires if it is to travel. Narrative art is also more practical than verbal storytelling because people can preserve the story and pass it through generations using art. A spoken account depends on someone being present to speak it and changes with each retelling; a made object carries the same story onward without its maker. Because people use art to tell narratives in this way, the purpose of art is communication.

Premises

Counter-arguments

There is no such thing as narrative art. Pictoral artists merely show images through painting, sculpture, and other visual means. They do not narrate stories. To say that an artist narrates a story is a figure of speech because painters and artists do not tell, they show. They can only imply meaning and order of events through audience interpretations of these visulas. The only direct action artists do is showing images. Painters generally are less concerned with the chronological order of events but in their spatial arrangement. Art does not serve the purpose of narration.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] Narrative art is real but it is one genre among many, and the premise moves from "art is used for X" to "the purpose of art is X". Abstraction, ornament, portraiture and landscape are not narrative, and no reason is given to treat the storytelling cases as definitive of the rest. [Rejecting P2] The claims about memorability and preservation are asserted without evidence, and they support a different conclusion than the one drawn: if the advantage of images is that they are vivid and durable, that is a point about the medium's efficiency rather than about the artist's purpose. The counter-argument presses the sharper objection — a picture shows rather than tells, and any narrative order is supplied by the viewer, which makes the communication in question a matter of interpretation rather than transmission.