CONCEPT
Expression
Metaphorical exemplification—a work <em>expresses</em> sadness not by depicting it but by metaphorically possessing sadness as a property and directing attention to it.
Expression, in Goodman's technical analysis, is exemplification operating through metaphorical transfer. A grey painting is not literally sad—sadness is a property of conscious beings, not of pigment on canvas. But the painting can be metaphorically sad, possessing sadness as a transferred property from the domain of human emotion to the domain of visual properties. The transfer occurs through conventions that associate certain formal features (grey tonality, downward compositional movement, spatial emptiness) with certain emotional qualities. The painting exemplifies the metaphorically possessed property—it is sad and directs attention to its sadness—and the viewer who perceives the expression gains understanding of the emotional quality through the specific visual means by which it is conveyed. Expression is not the artist's communication of her emotions to the viewer—Goodman rejected the transmission model of aesthetic emotion as psychologistic. It is the work's metaphorical possession of properties that the symbol system makes referentially available, and the cognitive value lies in the understanding the viewer achieves by attending to how the formal properties carry the metaphorical qualities. The understanding is irreducible: what the