Silent abstractions versus "Look at me" drawings: Corpus evidence that artworks' subject matter affects their fictive speech

Artworks can be said to metaphorically “speak” to their viewers (Sullivan 2006, 2009) in a form of fictive interaction (Pascual 2002). The current study examines the fictive speech of different types of artworks in a corpus of 1,105 examples extracted from DeviantART, the world’s largest online artwork community. In the corpus, abstract artworks are less often presented as “speaking” directly than figurative artworks. That is, a figurative painting might say, “Look at me!” in directly presented speech, whereas an abstract work is more likely to scream for attention without any direct speech attributed to the artwork. I suggest three reasons for this disparity. I also find that artworks depicting named characters participate in fictive conversations not shared by other works.