Mapping multivocality: how critics communicate complex meanings through metaphor

In cultural fields, where audiences view meaning as indeterminant, how do experts communicate their interpretations of multivocal artworks? Drawing on an archival dataset of contemporary art reviews, I examine how critics discuss ambiguous and complex meanings. Critics do not convey multiple, discrete meanings but instead focus on the relationships among multiple meanings. In particular, they use spatial metaphors to map these relationships. They describe the imagined physical features of spatial metaphors, such as shape, density, and movement, to portray concepts as discrete or intermingling, synchronously or asynchronously activated, having equal or unequal importance, or having a fixed or fluid relationship to one another. Critics’ portrayals of these different infrastructures through which meanings are linked shape their overarching interpretations of works. By articulating different kinds of multivocality via spatial metaphors, critics guide audiences to attend to certain meanings and their relationships, without foreclosing multivocality and ambiguity in meaning.