The conceptual framework analyzes artworks through four interconnected agencies: the artwork, artist, audience, and world. The framework can examine each individually or connected through lenses like subjective, structural, cultural, and postmodern. The artwork bridges artist and audience, reflecting ideas of its time and place. Artists develop unique perspectives and communicate experiences through their works. Audiences include the general public as well as specialists like critics and historians. The world encompasses historic events, influential figures, and the prevailing spirit of the times that shaped the artwork. Most importantly, students should understand the complexity and interdependence of the relationships between these agencies.

2. THE CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK
The Conceptual
Framework is a way
of analysing. The
four agencies
(artwork, artist,
audience and world)
can be discussed as
a whole, or by
connecting them to
The Frames
(Subjective,
Structural, Cultural
and Postmodern).

3. THE ARTWORK
• Is a bridge between the artist and the
audience.
• Is an artifact that reflects the ideas and
beliefs of a time and place.
• Complements or contests the traditions
of artmaking.
• Is an object that can be read to interpret
meaning or substance.
• Is shaped by the technology of the time.
• Demonstrates the technical resolution of
the artist’s ideas and approaches to
artmaking.
• Is a unique object that conveys the ideas
and views of the artist.

4. THE ARTIST
• Develops distinctive subjective viewpoints
through their artworks.
• Visually communicates their personal
experience.
• Visually documents events and ideas that are
reflected in their artwork.
• Explores new media and develop new aesthetic
conventions.
• Is a critical curator who constantly reflects upon
their own artmaking and refines the quality of
their work.
• Is a visionary who believes in what they do and
how they will represent their ideas and beliefs.
• Has their own idiosyncratic approach to
artmaking.
• Is guided by their individual philosophies in
artmaking.

5. THE AUDIENCE
• Includes the general public
responding to artworks, which is
different from the way critics and
curators respond.
• Includes specialised audiences,
such as critics and curators, and
their responses to artworks.
• Also involves historians who place
value on particular artworks
throughout history, suggesting their
importance.
• Includes patrons, who are people
who sponsor the artists by
commissioning them and
requesting particular forms of
representation within the artwork.
• Includes specific critics who
influence and govern the
reception of an artwork in terms
of it’s meaning and value.
• Can be shocked by an artist’s
new forms of representation.

6. THE WORLD
• Involves historic events that would have
influenced the artist’s approach to
artmaking.
• Refers to important people who shaped
the thinking of the world at the time the
artwork was made.
• Encompasses the spirit of the times, such
as what was in fashion, how society
managed itself, and the dominant political
force of the time.
• Includes other links between what was
going on in the world and the artworks
and artists of the time.
• Involves technical advances, which
influence the materials used in the
artwork.
• Includes beliefs and conventions of
society, for example, the difference
between Eastern and Western art, or
modern and postmodern artworks.

7. THE MOST IMPORTANT ASPECT TO
UNDERSTAND…
What a student should understand
more than anything is the
complexity of the nature of the
Conceptual Framework, that the
relationships between the
agencies of the framework are
interdependent, ever-changing,
and must be understood as both
individual components and a
whole concept at the same time
(much as one might understand
the Holy Trinity, God, Jesus and
the Holy Spirit are separate, but
one in the same).