With nothing to identify, the viewer is no longer told what to see

The argument

This account locates the purpose of abstract art in what it does to the person looking. A representational picture arrives with its subject already decided. The viewer's first task is recognition, and once the subject has been named the response that follows is largely set by what the subject is: a portrait invites a judgement about a person, a landscape a feeling about a place. Proponents of this position argue that recognition therefore works as an instruction, and that a great deal of ordinary looking consists of carrying it out. Abstract work withholds the instruction. There is nothing to name, so the viewer cannot discharge the encounter by identifying what is shown and must attend instead to what is actually in front of them and to what it provokes. Two people can stand before the same abstract painting, respond quite differently, and neither be mistaken, because there is no depicted fact against which a response could be wrong. On this account that is not a failure of communication but the point of the exercise: the work hands the labour of meaning to the viewer rather than performing it for them. Proponents argue that this is why the language around abstraction has so often been one of liberation. What is emancipated is the mind of the person looking, released from the habit of treating a picture as a report on something and allowed to work without a given answer. The purpose of abstract art, on this view, is not to tell anyone anything but to create a situation in which thought and feeling are the viewer's own responsibility.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Critics reply that the freedom described is largely illusory. Abstract work reaches its audience inside galleries, catalogues, titles and critical traditions that tell viewers how to look at it quite as firmly as a subject would, and viewers who feel lost in front of it are usually being instructed rather than liberated. They add that if no response can be mistaken then nothing the work does can be credited to it either, and the account ends by making the painting incidental to an experience the viewer could have anywhere. They also question the contrast, since a landscape does not dictate a response and the long record of disagreement about familiar pictures suggests recognition settles far less than the argument assumes.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] Recognising a subject narrows a response far less than the premise claims, as the long record of disagreement about familiar representational pictures shows. [Rejecting P2] Viewers confronted with abstract work still identify things in it, and where they cannot they commonly reach for the title, the label or the critic, which restores the instruction the premise removes. [Rejecting P3] If no response can be wrong, then no response can be a response to this work rather than to another, which drains the freedom of any connection to the painting. [Rejecting C] At most it follows that abstract work leaves the viewer more to do, not that emancipation of the mind is the purpose of the art.