Several long-standing debates resolve once art is understood structurally. Beauty is neither in the eye of the beholder nor in the object. The subjectivist holds that beauty is whatever a viewer happens to find beautiful. The objectivist holds that beauty is a property of the object itself, awaiting detection. Both misidentify the locus. Beauty is the name for successful resonance — the structural event in which a well-made form reconstitutes a feel inside someone capable of receiving it. It requires both the object (with structural features that afford the resonance) and the subject (with structural capacity to resonate). It is not a property of either alone, because it is an event between them. This dissolves the apparent disagreement between the traditions without splitting the difference: the objectivist was right that the form has real structural features, the subjectivist was right that the receiver is essential, and neither saw that beauty is what happens when the structural features meet a receiver structured to take them up.

Propaganda is art weaponized. The same mechanism that transmits tenderness across generations transmits hatred across a population. A film that builds affection for a character uses the same resonance operation as a film that builds contempt for an out-group. This is not a flaw in the structural account; it is what the account predicts. Art is a transmission technology. Technologies can be used to transmit content that serves or corrodes the exchanges among those who receive it. What distinguishes art from propaganda is not the mechanism but what the content does to the receiver's relations with others. Morally corrosive resonance is resonance engineered to narrow and harden — to foreclose the receiver's capacity for the mutual registration [§8.12](<8.12 Morality.md>) grounds morality in. This is distinct from merely persuasive or partisan art: art with a position, even a strongly partisan one, can leave the receiver's capacity for moral attention to others intact, because taking a position is not the same as foreclosing the receiver's capacity to register others as subjects of the same kind. Propaganda fails the [§8.12](<8.12 Morality.md>) criterion specifically — it is resonance designed to corrode the very mutual-registration capacity the receiver would need in order to recognize the corrosion as such. The morality of art is the morality of what art does to those it lands in, evaluated against the [§8.12](<8.12 Morality.md>) structural account of what corrodes intersubjective registration.

Art and religion share machinery because they share a structural function. Both externalize shared orientation. Both transmit non-propositional content across generations. Both bind communities around a feel too specific to paraphrase. This is why secular art has absorbed so many religious functions in societies where religion has receded — the structural need the machinery met does not disappear when the metaphysics does. It is also why religion without art has historically proven unstable: the propositional theology alone cannot carry what the tradition was for.

AI-generated art poses a genuine structural question, not a merely technological one. The question is not whether a non-self-modeling process can produce an artifact that triggers feels in receivers; clearly it can, because the resonance operation runs on the receiver's own architecture, not the producer's. The question is whether an artifact produced without a feel on the making side is art in the structural sense this section has developed, or something else that happens to use art's mechanism. The account here suggests the latter, on a derivation rather than a stipulation. Art is identified at [§8.13](<8.13 Art.md>) as the externalization of a feel from one self-modeling inside into another, which makes the internal aspect on the making side a structural component of the operation rather than a definitional add-on. An AI-produced image that moves a viewer is doing resonance without making in this structural sense — half the arc. Concealing that origin adds a harm the half-arc description alone does not name. A receiver who takes a work to be made has formed exactly the belief [§8.12](<8.12 Morality.md>) and [§9.2.2](<9.2.2 What is Required.md>) identify as recognition's first condition: that a genuinely other position is present in the exchange. When the work has no maker, that belief is false, and its collapse on discovery is a recognition failure rather than a mere factual disappointment, which is why it registers as betrayal rather than demystification. The mechanism is distinct from misrepresenting a real other's identity (as in catfishing) or violating a condition assumed between two correctly-recognized others (as in infidelity): in both of those cases the other is genuinely there and the recognition condition holds; here it does not, which is what makes the concealed half-arc case the sharper one. Whether to extend the term 'art' to cover the half-arc is partly a terminological question and partly a question about what the practice of art is for, not a question the structural account settles by itself. What the account does settle is that the two halves are structurally distinct operations argued from the prior section rather than stipulated by definition, and collapsing them loses something important about what art has been.

Censorship of art is a distinctive kind of harm. Suppressing art does not merely restrict expression in the way suppressing speech does. It severs a transmission interval that people separated by Space and Time rely on for non-propositional connection. A community whose art is censored loses access to the feels its members would otherwise share with each other and with those who came before. The harm reaches the conditions of connection ([§8.8](<8.8 Meaning.md>)) rather than only the content of any particular work.

Adorno's objection is met by claiming the non-identical, not resisting it. The account does not subsume the particular work under a concept; it identifies art as the register built to carry what the concept must drop — the perspectival reading that survives no paraphrase. Art and language are both representations, and every representation leaves a remainder; what distinguishes art is that the remainder is its content. Where propositional language ([§8.10](<8.10 Language.md>)) carries the claim and lets the feel fall away, art carries precisely the feel the claim discards — Adorno's non-identical named as a structural function rather than feared as a vulnerability. And the perspectival reading is genuinely *of* the structure, real on both sides and not mere projection, so art breaks the formula of literal realism without forfeiting the truth-content Adorno prizes. The suffering objection is met by a distinction Adorno's own demand requires. Letting suffering speak is a condition of truth, and art is where it speaks; but to register suffering as real is not to justify it. The account holds suffering as an inevitable, only-mitigable feature of existing, never as a necessity redeemed by the whole: the structure is necessary, the suffering within it is not thereby affirmed, and making art from suffering takes the side of the living without endorsing the wound — the requiem's content is death, its making an act of life. This is why, here, the whole is not the false. The account demonstrates the necessity of the *structure* while leaving the negative un-recuperated, and that is the one move that keeps a necessitarian metaphysics from reverting to the myth and fate Adorno warns of: necessity shown, not suffering sanctified.

Art is not decoration added to meaning. It is the structural technology by which the inside of one person's orientation becomes recoverable in another. Every cave painting, every lullaby, every love poem, every film, every dance is the same operation performed with different materials: someone reaches inward, shapes Substance into a form the reach can live in, and sends the form across the interval to others who complete the exchange by resonating with what the form carries. The feel does not travel directly between people; nothing does. It travels through the made thing. That a 40,000-year-old handprint on a cave wall can still move someone today is not a sentimental fact about the durability of human connection. It is the structural fact that self-modeling, externalization, and resonance together constitute a technology by which the feel of being a particular kind of creature in a particular kind of world can be preserved across the entire history of our species and reconstituted, still intact, in someone who was not there. Art is how a person expresses what it feels like to experience.

Art read structurally as resonance — the externalization of feel from one self-modeling inside into another through a made thing that holds it across the relational interval — dissolves the beauty subjectivist/objectivist disagreement (beauty is the event between form and receiver, not a property of either), grounds the distinction between art-with-position and propaganda in the [§8.12](<8.12 Morality.md>) mutual-registration criterion, explains why art and religion share machinery (both externalize shared orientation), keeps the AI-generated-art question well-posed without overreaching (resonance without making is half the arc, and whether to extend the term to the half-arc is partly terminological), meets Adorno's non-identical and suffering objections by making the non-identical art's own content and distinguishing letting suffering speak from justifying it, and locates censorship's distinctive harm in the severed transmission interval rather than in restricted expression alone. The register the made thing was reaching for when the reach exceeds what any made thing can hold is taken up at [§8.14](<8.14 Spirituality.md>).


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← [8.13.4 What is Confirmed](<8.13.4 What is Confirmed.md>) | [8.14 Spirituality](<8.14 Spirituality.md>) →
