Inkshedding

We are all guilty of distracting audiences from our main focus: Have you ever tried to make a picture look nicer than it was by adding a decorative frame to your artwork?

Elaborate media, such as a frame that "effectively adds meaning to a work of art," can be called hypermediacy (Sample J). In contrast, transparent presentations (of artwork or writing) are more ambiguous because the medium that are used can vanish. Hence, we may believe that transparent media is more realistic and comparable to our everyday speech; since both our speech and transparent media can become lost, these communications are "left for the audience to interpret" (Sample J).

Artists often prefer that their viewers can see their medium (hypermediacy), but sometimes artists are abstract--creating an image that can disappear. For example, cubism is an art movement where the frame does not disappear, however, sometimes the artwork appears to be unclear, ambivalent, and/or equivocal. While audiences may all obtain different interpretations of artwork, cubism allows the reader occasionally to clearly see his or her image (hypermediacy), but there are instances where cubistic artwork can disappear (transparent mediacy).

Artists include hypermediacy, transparent media, and both hypermediacy and transparent media.