It was held that the six great arts – visual art (including architecture and photography), drama, dance, music, film and literature – form a family of related, if largely autonomous, practices: they all work through the aesthetic, all address the imagination, and all are concerned with the symbolic embodiment of human meaning.

Remarkably, studies of visual perception have found that two-dimensional images projected onto the retina only achieve full dimensionality as a result of our perception: we infer the third dimension of depth. Sadly, though, as the urgency to expedite all communicative transactions usurps out customary patterns of exchange, perception is accelerated as well. There does not seem to be a great deal of time left over to infer--or interpret, or imagine--much of anything at all. In the end, of course, there is nothing real about this at all, except for our propensity to let it happen.