L’oeuvre
What great art aspires to.
GAMcCullough 2026

Assuredly there are greater and lesser artworks. Beyond a mastery of mediums, content, and even provenance, something more appears to set them apart. Is it a communication of something subtler? A nuance of reciprocity?

Today, what an artwork communicates is often framed as the being the art objects meaning. It is seen as either the artists’ intent having been embodied in form, or else as being post-constructed from the audiences understanding.

Meaning is the fulcrum we use to appreciate art with. Frequently we consider this meaning as being distributed across the artwork, the artist statement, the curator's essay, institutional framing, critical discourse, social and political context.¹ This is a contemporary art shift toward privileging concept, intent, and discourse.

The question this raises is, Is the artwork a vehicle for meaning or an opportunity for the audience to attach their understanding to? Is the art concerned with stating insights or generating insights? Is it communicating a conclusion or communicating a question?

When an artwork communicates a conclusion, the viewer is often placed in the position of either agreeing, disagreeing, or misunderstanding. Instead, an artwork can rather inspire questions, creating a form of intellectual empathy, a shared participation, and not necessarily a meeting of agreement. What is communicated is a question which is embodied rather than stated. The viewer doesn't merely understand the artist's question they begin asking it of themselves.

In this kind of communication, this exchange, in this empathy, the artist and viewer may never arrive at the same answer, but they can meet within the same field of inquiry and wonder. And that meeting, that being invited into this shared space of wondering, uncertainty, and searching for understanding, takes shape like a form of empathy.

What is communicated via this kind of artwork is not necessarily a fixed meaning but a shared horizon of questioning. ² The art elicits a space where different forms of knowing meet. Where in one shares the same questions, not necessarily the same answers. This horizon of empathy is the field of possibility within which inquiry can occur.

A shared horizon of questioning does not require that all participants have the same nature, only that they can participate in a meaningful inquiry. The emphasis shifts from who or what we are, to how we engage with uncertainty, meaning, and discovery. It seeks awe, a wonderment at what is possible.

Traditionally, empathy has been framed as a specifically human capacity, a mutual feeling shared with another person. Yet shared wonderment is somewhat broader then this. It can arise when different beings, or different modes of intelligence, orient themselves towards the same phenomenon without claiming complete mastery of it. Eureka doesn’t necessarily lead in this ‘exploration’, it is gently absorbed into the horizon of query as a realization of possibilities.

To achieve this reorienting towards a phenomena means one requires attentiveness towards it. In order to even share an emotion or feeling or understanding we need to first attend to both the phenomena encountered and ourselves.

This common ground of empathy is one of inquiry, not one of identity. Empathy, in this framework, becomes less about sharing feelings and more about sharing attentiveness.³ The ethical gesture is not "I know what you experience," but rather "I am willing to remain with the question alongside you." This shared horizon of questioning is not exclusively human, but it remains deeply humanizing because it values curiosity, openness, dialogue, and the willingness to encounter otherness without immediately absorbing it into one's own perspective This attentive encounter is where distinct forms of intelligence, knowledge, and experience can meet without becoming identical.

Attentiveness is active but not possessive. It doesn't require that we fully understand another being, place, artwork, or intelligence. It asks only that we remain genuinely present to what is emerging. In that sense, attentiveness can extend across many kinds of boundaries—between people, cultures, species, landscapes, and perhaps even between human and digital forms of intelligence.4

Great art conditions and releases a shared attentiveness of orientation toward something worthy of notice, care, or inquiry.

Hence a contemporaneous artist's role may be beyond transmitting meaning and reside closer to ‘cultivating this shared attentiveness’.5 In other words, great artists seek to create conditions in which a horizon of questioning can emerge among viewers, materials, places, memories, and ideas. This depends on inspiring a willingness to keep looking, listening, and wondering together. That willingness to share an attitude of humbly seeking a truth may be one of the most durable forms of connection we have as individuals and society’s across generations.

The artist's role is thus more justly described as cultivating shared attentiveness, not as transmitting meaning.

Attentiveness being central to this role means we need to consider it itself. Attentiveness today is often mis-construed as simply attention. TikTok, Instagram have all become defacto gate keepers simply by measuring quantity of attention. Yet attention comes in many significant forms. In addition to quantity of attention are duration of attention and clarity of attention. Our current emphasis on volume of attention is grounded on speed, which is limiting and privileges specific types of art.

Duration of attention as well, can be amplified through distribution, promotion, repetition, and scale. Contrary to these two aspects of attention, clarity of attention seems to depend on a more delicate alignment between maker, work, and viewer. It often arrives quietly.6

Yet clarity of attention may be one of the few artistic values that cannot be mass-produced. It occurs in the ecotone of a horizon of shared attentiveness. It is where wonder is emphatically shared. The viewer and artist are both experiencing the same awe, even across generations and contexts. That may be why some of the most significant art in any era is not necessarily the art that dominates the conversation, but the art that gradually changes what people are capable of noticing. This is the bedrock of great art and artists: it is art that conditions the emergence of a shareable horizon of clarity of attention permitting inquiry, wonder and discovery.

Footnotes*

1. Contemporary understandings of artistic meaning as distributed among artwork, audience, institutions, criticism, and context draw upon post-structuralist and contemporary art theory, particularly the writings of Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault.

2. The notion of a “shared horizon of questioning” is indebted to Hans-Georg Gadamer's concept of horizons and dialogical understanding, though it is employed here in the service of inquiry rather than interpretation alone.

3. This understanding of empathy as openness to another perspective rather than emotional identification resonates with the philosophies of Martin Buber and Emmanuel Levinas.

4. The extension of attentiveness across species, environments, and forms of intelligence reflects themes present in the ecological aesthetics of the work of James J. Gibson

5. The conception of art as cultivating conditions for experience rather than transmitting fixed meanings bears affinity to John Dewey's aesthetics in Art as Experience.

6. The distinction between quantity, duration, and clarity of attention parallels contemporary discussions concerning the attention economy, particularly those of Jonathan Crary and Yves Citton.

7. The idea that important art changes what people are capable of noticing recalls John Berger's reflections on perception and James J. Gibson's ecological theory of visual awareness.

Orientations*

Barthes, Roland. Image-Music-Text. New York: Hill and Wang, 1977.

Berger, John. Ways of Seeing. London: BBC and Penguin Books, 1972.

Buber, Martin. I and Thou. New York: Scribner, 1970.

Citton, Yves. The Ecology of Attention. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2017.

Crary, Jonathan. Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999.

Dewey, John. Art as Experience. New York: Perigee Books, 1934.

Gadamer, Hans-Georg. Truth and Method. New York: Continuum, 1989.

Gibson, James J. The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1979.

Haraway, Donna. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham: Duke University Press, 2016.

Levinas, Emmanuel. Totality and Infinity. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969.

Morton, Timothy. Being Ecological. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2018.

* Footnotes & Selected Influences generated by free chatgpt 2026