There are two ways that we can look at this strange relation between sensation and meaning art and media, and one is from the side of the subject and the other the object. Let us begin with the subject first. We think that what makes something an artwork is a property of the work itself, such that it has art just in the same way that our coffee and bitterness and sweetness . Perhaps this is most common-sense theory of art and media, and is certain the one that you most hear about in the newspapers, and on radio and television. Thus, we get the endless and infinite debates about what is good art, as if it were a matter of simply recognising something about a painting in the way that one comes to recognise what a dog is by the ability to remember certain features.
Good art is usually figurative and bad art abstract or conceptual.
But that is to treat art as though it were simply an object of perception with certain objective properties, which is to miss completely the significance of the aesthetic relation to objects. What is important is precisely this relation itself and not the object, for it is clear, with what is called modern art , that anything can be an art object, for what the object is that matters, but how we relate to it. This is when this peculiar gap between sensation and meaning, which is how we have defined the art and media object, returns. For if art were merely a matter of sensations then it aesthetic judgements would be merely a question of preference. You like Picasso, I like Duchamp and so on.