1 Pictures and their surfaces 1 Greg Currie [To appear in Jerome Pelletier and Alberto Voltolini (Eds) Pictorial Experience and Aesthetic Appreciation, Routledge.] Key words: drawing, film, painting, photography, surface, transparency, Scruton, Walton Aesthetics is often characterised as disconnected from moral, political or generally practical concerns—one reason why aesthetic notions are now regarded as unsuited to ground a comprehensive philosophy of the arts, where those connections are evidently in place. We should not waste time arguing that all art is aesthetic in nature. But we can restore some significance to the art/aesthetic connection by recognising that aesthetic activity is a form of social activity, that aesthetic artefacts are things which manifest the thoughts, feelings and actions of makers. Just as microscopes, telescopes and, according to some, photographs extend our perceptual reach, so these artefacts extend our capacity for intellectual, emotional and bodily connection with others. One task is then to understand the many and varied ways of ‘making manifest’ that are available in the arts; another is to understand the ways these thoughts, feelings and actions are processed at different cognitive levels by audiences, with sometimes little or no consciousness of the processes involved. In contemplating this latter task we may hope that the science of social cognition has things to tell us. I will point to some ideas that may help, as well as to the scarcity of evidence that they do. Throughout I focus on pictures, a category which quickly divides into sub-kinds with very different explanatory requirements. My overarching concern is with the artistic distinctness of photographs, cinematic images and other ‘mechanical’ pictures on the one hand, and paintings, drawings and generally ‘hand-made’ images on the other. This distinction has generated other speculations I’ll discuss, notably the idea that photographs do, and paintings do not, enable us to see the things they are of—from which we get the placement of photographs alongside telescopes and other ‘aids to vision’. Section 1 briefly sketches some art historical and art theoretic context for the discussion. Section 2 distinguishes between two kinds of depictive marks and two ways that marks can be related to what is depicted. Section 3 uses the case of mosaic depiction to broaden our understanding of the kinds of marks that can be artistically significant. Section 4 asks whether work in the empirical sciences of mind can deepen our understanding of the artistic relevance of the marked surface. Section 5 introduces the central claim: it is a quite general fact about painting that engagement with it requires attention to the marked surface as a record of activity, something that is not true of photographs or cinematic images. Section 6 explains and responds to three objections to the claim. Section 7 argues that, the claim notwithstanding, there are ways in which photographs and cinematic images function as registers of bodily activity. Section 8 considers two things which have been said about photography which an advocate of the central claim need not endorse, while seeing how that claim may seem to support them. 1 This paper originated from workshop presentations in Paris and Turin. My thanks go to Jerome Pelletier and Alberto Voltolini for inviting me to those events and for their comments then and later. My thanks also go to the audiences on both occasions for their comments and to audiences at the universities of Leeds, Edinburgh and Miami where developing versions have been presented.