WORDS OF ART: THE V

Department of Fine Arts, Okanagan University College

WORDS OF ART: THE V_LIST

Compiled by Robert J. Belton

If you would like to see something removed, added or corrected, please feel free to contact bbelton@klo1.ouc.bc.ca.

VALENCES: See field theory.

VALIDITY: 1. In informal logic, validity is determined by whether or not the conclusion of an argument follows necessarily from its premises. If the premises of a valid analytic argument are true, the conclusion must be true. If the premises of a synthetic argument are true, relevant, and sufficient, the conclusion is likely to be true. Note that an argument may be structurally valid even if one of the premises is untrue. In the syllogism "Picasso was a painter; painters are wild and irreverent; therefore, Picasso was wild and irreverent," it is undemonstrable that all artists are wild and irreverent. So the argument is untrue even though it is valid. Similarly, an argument that is invalid (see invalidity) may happen to be true, as in "Roumanian artists speak Roumanian; Picasso was not a Roumanian artist; therefore, Picasso did not speak Roumanian." The conclusion is not certified by the premises. It is conceivable that a non-Roumanian artist could speak Roumanian, although we happen to know in this instance that he did not. Obviously, the best argument is going to be both valid and true. 2. In a widely read book entitled Validity in Interpretation, E. D. Hirsch argued against what has become the standard postmodern disclosure of multiple meanings (polysemy) by asserting that certain interpretations were more valid than others, particularly those which allowed the author, rather than the work and/or its affect on the audience, to have authority in the determination of meaning. See authorial ignorance, authorial irrelevance, authorial responsibility, meaning, meaning in and meaning to, read into, significance.

VALUE: Under construction.

VALUE-FREEDOM: Under construction.

VANISHING POINT: Under construction.

VANITAS: The general term applied to a category of subject matter (see content) expressing the folly of vanity and the belief in the permanence of healthy existence, beauty, and the like. Vanitas themes include such things as beautiful young women confronting death in the form of a skeletal figure (e.g., Anton Wiertz), figures meditating over skulls or skeletons (Georges De La Tour), withering flowers (a host of seventeenth century Dutch still-life artists), children blowing bubbles (Chardin, Paul Peel), and so on. The category is one of the more common in all of pre-modern Western art history.

VARIETY: Under construction.

VARIORUM: Under construction.

VARNISH: Under construction.

VATIC: Under construction.

VAUDEVILLE: Under construction.

VAULT: Any of various types of arched ceiling (see arch). A "barrel" vault is like an arch increased in depth to create a simple tunnel. While quite effective for some purposes, the disadvantage of a barrel vault is that any penetration of it, as for windows, weakens its ability to withstand thrust. This disadvantage is alleviated when two or more barrel vaults are run into each other to create a "groin" vault (so called because of the complicated geometry of the intersections): there, the weakness of the one barrel is compensated for by the other. A "ribbed" vault articulates the edges of the intersections with stone work creating a segmental effect. A "fan" vault is an exceedingly complicated, essentially decorative ribbing that resembles a fan or, in some extremely elaborate instances, lace-work. The history of vault development determines to a great extent the evolution of innumerable other architectural details. See, for example, buttress. See also wall

VECTORS: See field theory.

VEDUTA: Under construction.

VEHICLE: In the literary theory of I. A. Richards, the means by which a metaphor exploits something familiar (the vehicle) in order to convey poetically an adequate impression of something unfamiliar (the tenor). For an example, see vehicle shift.

VEHICLE SHIFT: By analogy with paradigm shift, a vehicle shift is the point at which certain types of vehicle become too much of a cliché to operate effectively in the production of expressive metaphor. For example, the standard vanitas vehicles had become so conventional by the early nineteenth century that those indifferent to academic thought sought new vehicles for old tenors in natural appearances. For example, Théodore; Rousseau's Under the Birches, Evening might appear at first glance to be a simple scene of a grove of trees, but it also implies a narrative about the cycle of life and the inevitability of change. The phenomenon of vehicle shift allows one to circumnavigate easily the apparent paradox of Courbet's title The Artist's Studio: A Real Allegory....

VERBUM INFANS: Under construction.

VERFREMDUNGSEFFEKT: Under construction.

VERIFICATION: Karl Popper argued that nothing could ever be proven true once and for all, since no-one could ever be sure that there was no exception to the rule. A statement like "all swans are white" would only appear to be true to those who had never seen a black one. Popper concluded that the scientific method could not proceed by verification but only by falsification. That is, one would know the statement "all swans are white" was false as soon as one saw a black swan. See also corroboration, plausibility, testability, and validity.

VERISIMILITUDE: The degree to which something seems to be true; used of the putative accuracy of a representation. Cf naturalism, representation.

VERNACULAR: A common popular or regional variation from international, academic, or other "accepted" standard usage in language, architecture, etc.

VERSION: Under construction.

VERTICAL AND LATERAL THINKING: Under construction.

VIBRATION: Under construction.

VICTIMARCHY: Word coined by Warren Farrell in The Myth of Male Power to describe a society which conceives of its members as victims -- perpetually unable to direct their own affairs or to control their own destinies. In other words, both men and women are victims of patriarchy. See new masculinity.

VIDEO: Under construction.

VIGNETTE: Under construction.

VIRTUAL: Under construction.

VISCERAL CLUTCH: Under construction.

VISIGOTHS IN TWEED: Derogatory synonym for the cultural left coined for use in the popular media by Dinesh D'Souza.

VISION: Under construction.

VISIONARY MODE OF ARTISTIC CREATION: In Modern Man in Search of a Soul, C. G. Jung distinguished between two modes of artistic creation, the psychological and the visionary. The former is common and unremarkable because the artist simply interprets and illuminates the contents of consciousness -- rational or not -- in such a manner that the result is intelligible to an audience. The visionary, in contrast, derives material from the primordial realm of the archetypes in the collective unconscious, so that the result is astonishing, confusing, frightening, or even disgusting. The presumption here is that the visionary artist is "called to a greater task than the ordinary mortal," which many postmodernists find an objectionable idea.

VISUAL: Under construction.

VISUAL AGNOSIA: See interpretive agnosia.

VISUAL CULTURE: The body of cultural artifacts which are experienced principally through vision, without the traditional academic separation between high and low culture. Books which deal with visual culture are as comfortable discussing film stills, advertisements, political posters, graffitti and the like as they are works of fine art. More importantly, perhaps, the terminology and conceptual assumptions about the ways in which meanings are produced are the same. A notable example is W. J. T. Mitchell's Picture Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994).

VISUALITY: Under construction.

VISUAL LANGUAGE: See language, semiotics.

VISUAL RHYME: See enclosed rhyme, rhyme.

VISUAL SEMIOLOGY: See semiotics.

VISUAL SEMIOTICS: See semiotics.

VISUAL SLANG: See colloquialism, slang.

VITAL IMPORT: Suzanne Langer's conception of art as presentational symbols precludes fixed, determinate content, so she replaces the notion of conclusive meaning with vital import, which is the non-objective communication of emotional significance. This is similar to Barthes' notion of the third or obtuse meaning (see signifiance).

VITALISM: Under construction.

VOCABULARY: Under construction.

VOICE: Under construction.

VOICE-OVER: Under construction.

VOID: Under construction.

VOIR DIRE: Under construction.

VOLUME: Under construction.

VOTIVE: Under construction.

VULGAR: 1. See vernacular. 2. Coarse, lacking in cultivated manners or taste, as in vulgar arts (see liberal arts). 3. Facile and superficial, when applied as an adjective to certain critical methodologies, especially Marxism. There, it derives from Marx's use of the phrase "vulgar economics" in Das Kapital, by which he meant a simple study of rather cosmetic phenomena, often veiling an implicit defense of the bourgeois status quo. The antonym would be "authentic Marxism."

VULGAR ARTS: See liberal arts.

VULGAR MARXISM: See vulgar (sense 3).

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