Aesthetics: scene or "music"?

Bougereau

Cezanne

Picasso

Duchamp

Matta

I'm still having somewhat of a problem with my understanding of visual aesthetics. I'm wanting to say that the sensory aspect of the visual is something that is strictly functional—and in this sense it must describe a scene where light is used to understand contour and positioning, color is used to differentiate objects and materials, and so forth... I still believe that these elements can be played with (color especially), but I don't think there would be any sense out of such playfulness other than a loose "musical" arrangement of shapes, values, and hues.

I'm not quite sure if I want to embrace this fundamentally arbitrary sort of visual "music", or stick with representing a scene that is in some way tied to a narrative. The latter definitely has sense; the former definitely doesn't, but it explores its medium more completely...


i. Journal Entry: Baya-baya-ba
ii. Journal Entry: Art and Indecisiveness


2/12 update:

For the sake of having this make sense, I'm going to put forward a (precarious) distinction rather than a choice between two alternatives.

Scene	"Non-Scene" (purely formal)
"Illusionistic" Refers to a perceptual visual vocabulary and emulates aspects of it, e.g. objects, lighting, etc.	Doesn't correspond to perceptual objects or vocabulary (at least in any recognizable way). Likely stresses "material-ness", e.g. paint on canvas, lines on a page, chiselled stone.

In actuality this distinction is a little troubling, as it would be unlikely that a given work would fall solely into either category. "Scenes" always have some aspect of purely formal arrangements in them, and formal arrangements, when viewed by a viewer, will almost undoubtedly have "retinal" presuppositions thrust upon them (e.g. this color pushes forward; these values show form).

In other words, there's some kind of odd gambit going on between the two.