Frances to Michael and others... It seems the ruling polity in any federal state usually interacts with art for reasons of conformity and control, which under normal conditions is reasonable enough, but the motivating factors for such control can vary widely. The government of a country can interact to control persons like artists, and to control objects like artworks, for reasons of say cost or love or need or hate or fear. This interaction to control humans likely occurs in all social settings for some communal and individual benefit leading to the common good of all. The act of collecting and connecting and correcting persons together is a natural enough human trait. All societies and to include cults and clans and tribes and countries that become nationalistic however tend to take these natural acts wrongly to their unnatural extreme. The interaction then becomes an intrusion or interruption and even an interference. The entry of a social government into the lives of its people from primal to civil for justified reasons of conforming and controlling them is fundamentally normal and good, but it is nationalism with its patriotism and nepotism that is abnormal and bad.
As an analytic exercise, this kind of interactive situation could specifically be located within a pragmatist semiotic venue. The initial quasi "grammatic" division or informative structure of any such sign model would of course provide syntactic representants, and semantic referentants, and pragmatic interpretants. Beyond this informative formal stage of semiosis would next fall an evaluative factual stage and then last an evocative forceful stage, but a sign need bear only some information to exist as such. All normal human groupings are assumed to be natural and cultural, and to hold any society as such an informative sign it can be placed in a ground that gives it a causal reality. This ground of causation in fact determines the sign to be mainly a connected index. The related causal structure of the index however is not strictly a cause and effect linkage, because this pair would form only a dyadic framework, and for semiotics it is required that all signs must be terns in roughly a triadic framework. For this present act of semiosis therefore the syntactic monad is deemed the moderating vehicle of interaction, and the semantic dyad is deemed the motivating objects of inaction, and the pragmatic triad is deemed the monitoring effects of reaction. The fundamental representant vehicle is thus an interacting result, motivated by the originating object, such as an intrusion. The referential referentant object is thus a motivating stimulus and an originating source that causes the vehicle to emerge, and that determines the main kind of indexic sign the vehicle will be, but the root core like fear for instance is inactive because it is not given to public view as the vehicle is. The instrumental interpretant effects are thus a reactive consequence such as relief that is determined by the moderating vehicle. In monitoring the relation between the vehicular result and the stimulating objects, the effects act to control the conformity between them so as to assure signers of some normality. The interaction of say intrusion to regulate acts like art then becomes a signifier representing the referred motive of the overt activity. The behaviour of the ruling authorities, such as taking charge by police force, is an indexic sign of the motivating drive like fear that determined this very index itself. The interaction or sign vehicle and its inactive motives or sign objects are connected together in a sign ground of causal contiguity, whatever the motive may be that caused the incursion to occur. The incursion does not determine the motive, but rather the motive does determine the incursion. In an indexical ground, the motivating origin or cause of the incursion is a stimulus that acts as a driving key, like an illness that determines a symptom of the disease, and the receptive effect is the determined reaction of it all. The value of the motivated incursion furthermore is found in the satisfaction of some compelling need, which here is the referred motive. The semantic cause and the syntactic result as related to each other here are not however of semiotic symmetry, as say formal icons are where the signifier and the signified are symmetrically similar to each other, and even interchangeable as say the portrayed pictorial result is with the motivating stimulus or live model. An index however can leapfrog along either forward or backward, so that in a regressive way for example the deep cause or illness of a sensed result or symptom itself becomes a result of yet a further deeper cause or disease and germ, and so on indefinitely. In the public or private realm of art, there are some bad absolutes that any social polity must control, even if the criterion is more ethical and forensic than aesthetic. Actual "kiddy porn" and "suff sex" should clearly be forbidden. There are sound material and technical and medical and legal reasons for example that would warrant government incursion, in the interest of the common social good, but these situations to be right and just are rare. No artist can impose an undue expense on the scarce resources of the wider community at large, by say deliberately causing even consented harm to others that would require their health care and aid, nor use a dead or live human person in whole or part as an aesthetic means to even a good artistic end. There are some things posited as art that clearly defy common sense and safety, such as the unhealthy use of excrement as a medium by prisoners to make graffiti on a prison wall. On the other hand, governments will often make laws that enforce the protection of "eligible" artists and "legitimate" artworks as being national treasures, despite wrongful censorship and rightful ownership. The determination of art is found in the empowered form of aesthetic works, and not in such peripheral factors as their content or meaning, or value or worth, or context or function or usage, or owner or intent or effect. These factors are marginal to art, and at best are extra aesthetic.
