The artistic form performs two distinct but dialectically related tasks: first, it must embody the artistic content, secondly, to pass it on to those to whom art is addressed. Thus the communicative function of art obliges the form to have not only a constructively aesthetic, but also a character. Accordingly, the content of the art considered in relation to its figurative and expressing system can be defined as artistic information.
The best proof of the uniqueness of artistic information is its non-conductivity in another sign system, its inability to be "transcoded". If the scientific information can be expressed in a variety of sign systems and be freely transcoded from one system to another, the artistic information is indivisible to the embodying characters. This is explained by the fact that the structure of the sign is always determined by the structure of the meaning which it is called upon to convey. Thus verbal language and all artificial codes are created by mankind to convey abstract meanings. Speech has become the principal and most powerful meaning of materializing thought, because it is capable of appropriately embody the results of the work of abstract thinking. In art, however, enriched artistic expression is only one of many equal means of embodying artistic content, because the poetic, conceptual, emotional transformation of the world by man is infinitely richer, more complex and more versatile than intellectual theoretical knowledge. In order to express this richness, different "languages" - plastic, pictorial, musical, choreographic, verbal, etc., each of which allows to reveal inaccessible to the "languages" perception of reality. The vastness of artistic information imposes on the art to produce a whole series of different sign systems that use a variety of signals within the reach of these signals of visual and auditory perception, tion and hearing directly related to human consciousness and can bring him spiritual information contained in artistic work.
Within the limits of visual and auditory signals (or both types of perception - in theater and cinema), artistic creativity uses all means to construct the figurative signs, as art has to convey not abstract meanings but very specific meanings - the artistic image recreates the specificity of the depiction, and the artistic expression is emotionally specific.
This "concrete squareness" of the artistic information determines the features of the characters called to embody it:
- their image structure, which allows the sign to have a double, objective-subjective meaning and two-plane-rational-emotional meaning;
- their inseparable connection with the meaning expressed, which, by virtue of which the least change in meaning requires a change of sign, and the change of sign leads to a change of meaning;
- Their inadmissibility of any strict "grammatical" system that makes it impossible to have strict rules for artistic "syntax" or artistic "algorithm";
- the wide variation of the artistic language because the system of figurative signs is deeply modified in the different types of art, it is radically transformed into every step of the artistic culture and is very much altered in the individual art of every great artist;
- the form of art is both a model and a system of figurative signs, a material construction and a specific language, bearing aesthetic and communicative value.
Art is a way of modeling the realm of human values, which serves to obtain specific cognitive and evaluation information, to preserve and transmit it with the help of a number of imagery systems. Art is the life activity and the action of man.