"you can also step back and see the entire work in one take, which you cannot do with music or stories. Memory plays a far greater role in them than in visual art." Michael.
This is vaguely right but in practice we don't take in the whole at once. It has been demonstrated that our focal area, what we actually can focus on in each eye is quite small. You can test this yourself by closing one eye and then blocking something in your field of vision with your thumb at arm's length. What you block out is one eye's area of focus, regardless of distance between that eye and the objects that are blocked. That's why our eyes are constantly darting across our field of vision, stitching a scene together from memory and "instant replay", going back and forth repeatedly, and thus enabling our visual cortex to provide us an emergent pattern ( or Bernstein's "concept") from which we invent -- confabulate -- what we "see". Optical devices can track our eye movements and record the chronology of looking. When subjects have used these devices to look at paintings they (the devices) map the trail of looking and subjects tend to follow the same tracks of others. In other words, artworks can be composed to more or less entice a given sequence of focal areas, allowing for societal symbols (or taboos) trumping any purely formal elements. WC
