Communication and art Helena Pires, Silvana Mota-Ribeiro & Anne Beyaert-Geslin The 31 st issue of the journal, Comunicação e Sociedade, is dedicated to the theme “Communication and Art”. The present issue, gathers a collection of texts covering a wide array of problematics, approaches and methodologies, that explore a diverse range of modalities and artistic languages, including dance, theatre, the cinema and the vis- ual arts. The cases presented and the diferent art forms under analysis and refection, express a cultural polyphony, consisting of a combination of the Portuguese-speaking world and European cultural heritage in general, but also the idiosyncratic characteristics of culture and the arts in Portugal (in interaction with the sphere of inter-culturality). Ref- erences are made to a signifcant range of artistic practices, and to the critical thinking fostered by the artistic sector, in articulation with the feld of communications. Given the combination of such a plurality of diferent perspectives in the context of this issue, it is worthwhile pondering the various possible conclusions that may be drawn from these diferent texts, authors, and realities and objects. Any compilation of texts by several authors, even if anchored on a theme somehow shared, is always, we might say, a “provocation”, a meeting space that destabilizes the limits of pre-given signifcation that each text preserves, in its illusory autonomy in intra-discursive terms. Inevitably, this publication is frst and foremost an inventor of new meanings, a producer of con- nections, but also of debatable classifcations, with a view to proposing new interpreta- tions. Ultimately this is an exercise in hermeneutics – that proceeds from explanation of the work and the author to an understanding of that which has caught, or continues to catch, the interest of the editors, who are involved in a wide range of diferent concerns, and theoretical and methodological problems, shared by the academic and artistic com- munities. This issue, thus, addresses an approximation between communication, in its possibilities of interrogation on the public, mediation, discourses produced in the feld of culture and the arts, on the one hand, and art itself, in its intermodal and interdisciplinary multiple dimensions, in the ways in which it increasingly calls upon the skills and poten- tial of communication, both in artistic creation and in artistic production, on the other. Ultimately, this will involve discussion, at least at an implicit level, of the porosity of the boundaries between art and science. This debate is even more relevant today, given that we have witnessed a profound ontological and epistemological crisis, that transcends a wide array of social and cultural practices and representations. This issue aims to explore the feld of communication, in terms of the way that it challenges art. The texts published herein, which we will now briefy summarise, are stimulating starting points. Firstly we would like to clarify the interpretational guidelines that headed this par- ticular order of the texts presented in this issue, as well as the proposed reading that to a certain extent enables them to somehow establish new meanings between each other. Comunicação e Sociedade, vol. 31, 2017, pp. 13 – 17 doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.17231/comsoc.31(2017).2601