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of form and content. Styles, however, by providing artists their audiences with a familiar background, allow for the exercise artistic freedom, liberating as much as they constrain. Styles can oppress artists; more often, styles set them free. (Virtually all meaningful human activity above the level of autonomic reflexes is carried out within stylistic framework: gestures, language use, social courtesies such as norms laughter or body distance in personal encounters. Style and culture virtually coterminous.)

4. Novelty and creativity. Art is valued, and praised, for its novelty, creativity, originality, and capacity to surprise its audience. Creativity both the attention-grabbing function of art (a major component its entertainment value) and the artist’s perhaps less jolting capacity explore the deeper possibilities of a medium or theme. Though these kinds of creativity overlap, The Rite of Spring is creative most strikingly first sense, Pride and Prejudice in the second. The unpredictability creative art, its newness, plays against the predictability of conventional style or formal type (sonata, novel, tragedy, and so forth). Creativity novelty are a locus of individuality or genius in art, referring to that of art that is not governed by rules or routines. Imaginative talent graded in art according to its ability to display creativity. (Creativity called for and admired in countless other areas of life. We admire creative solutions to problems in dentistry and plumbing as well as the arts. The persistent pursuit of creativity shows itself, for example, in the reluctance of careful writers to use the same word a second time in a sentence where synonyms are available; the thesaurus exists less for greater precision in writing than for the sake of pleasur able creative variety.)

5. Criticism. Wherever artistic forms are found, they exist alongside some kind of critical language of judgment and appreciation, simple more likely, elaborate. This includes the shoptalk of art producers, public discourse of critics, and the evaluative conversation of audiences. Professional criticism, including academic scholarship applied to where it is evaluative, is a performance itself and subject to evaluation by its larger audience; critics routinely criticize each other. There wide variation across and within cultures with regard to the complexity even those that produce complicated art. It is generally much more elaborate in the art discourse of literate European and Oriental history. Criticism obviously exists in many spheres of non-aesthetic life with proviso: criticism of a kind analogous to art criticism applies enterprises where the potential achievement is complex and open-ended. There is generally no criticism applied to perperformances in hundred-meter dash: the fastest time wins, no matter how inelegantly. It only where criteria for success itself are complex or uncertain— politics or religion, for instance—that critical discourse becomes structurally similar to art criticism.)

6. Representation. In widely varying degrees of naturalism, art object, including sculptures, paintings, and oral and written narratives, sometimes even music, represent or imitate real and imaginary of the world. As Aristotle first observed, human beings irreducible plea sure in repre sentation: a realistic painting of the folds red satin dress, a detailed model of a steam engine, or the tiny plates, silverware, goblets, and lattice-crust cherry pie on the dinner table doll’s house. But we can also enjoy repre sentation for two other reasons: we can take plea sure in how well a repre sentation is accomplished, can take plea sure in the object or scene represented, as in a calendar rendering of a beautiful landscape. The first is about skill, rather than repre sentation as such; the second is reducible to pleasure in the subject matter, rather than repre sentation in itself. Delight in imitation and sentation in any medium, including words, may involve the combined impact of all three pleasures. (Blueprints, newspaper illustrations, passport photographs,