Adjectivication: Art moves in the direction of the adjective, not in the direction of the noun.Da Beat has had somewhat of a revelation recently. As some of you may know he's a vehement proponent of Art = communication, and thus he likes to think there are strong similarities between art and language. Even if you don't agree with that premise, you may want to humor Da Beat and bear with him for a bit. He promises to try and be brief.
In language there are nouns depicting an object or subject, and adjectives depicting the properties of the subject. Da Beat realised that art tries to capture the adjective, not the noun, and most great art tries to move away from the noun and deeper into the adjectives. Moreover, he believes that especially the art that manages to move beyond the known adjectives is the art we appreciate as Art with the capital A.
An example may clarify:
When a photographer sets up to capture “a beautiful landscape”, clearly the photographer tries to capture the beauty, and not specifically the landscape. If you need a technical document for a land survey, then you try to capture the landscape as correctly as possible, but most artists try to capture whatever they deem beautiful about the entire scene before them.
Obviously, when most tourists and the beginning photographers experience beauty, they may point the camera in the general direction of that beauty and take a snap. The capture will likely be more a record of the landscape then of its beauty. This then is the first hurdle to take when you want to become a better photographer: reducing the composition to the essence of that beauty.
This does not apply to landscapes only, of course, but similarly to more complex concepts like
a weeping woman as depicted by Picasso. Clearly, Picasso attempted to move the expression away from a mere representation of a woman in tears, to the essence of crying and sadness, and the corresponding outburst of emotion.
Now, we may have many adjectives that represent an outburst of emotions through crying, and some of us are more eloquent than others when trying to describe such an outburst, and some of us know more words than others, may even be proficient in several languages, but every single one of us on the face of this earth, no matter how many languages you speak, know that there are times that words are just not enough, that experiences go beyond words.
In fact, crying itself is very likely a form of expression that signals our inability to express ourselves properly in ordinary language. In turn, even words themselves can be ordered in different form, rhythm, and rhyme, to form poetry that evokes emotions between the lines, between and beyond the actual words. Especially in poetry the nouns are primarily used to symbolise the emotions and adjectives commonly associated with these nouns, trying to evoke the entire spectrum of emotions which simply can't be described in mere words.
Thus, art is an attempt to capture the adjectives associated with a subject (the noun) and some art obviously tries to dissociate as far away from the noun as is reasonably possible to capture the essence of all adjectives. Clearly, we may not actually be able to explicate all adjectives which is exactly where art has its function: to evoke the additional adjectives that can't be written in words. This is even true for language itself where poetry attempts to evoke additional insights and emotions between the lines.