An artist begins with an Idea, a schematic approximation of a perfect and fully determined Form. The Idea is then rendered as an Instance, the work itself, which is also an approximation of the Form—now fully determined, but imperfect and distorted, an approximation of an approximation.
Form and Instance are both fully determined, but for opposite reasons. The Form is complete because nothing in it could be otherwise, the Instance because everything in it had to be decided—this pigment, this interval, this word. The Idea alone is determined unevenly, fixed where it matters and open elsewhere. Each thing it leaves open is one thing it cannot get wrong, so the schematic Idea is more faithful than the Instance.
When a beholder arrives, the work becomes communication: the artist's Idea, sent through the Instance. Imagine a diamond ⟠, the Form at the top, the artist's Idea and the beholder's Idea at the side corners, the Instance at the bottom. The artist comes down one side, the beholder climbs the other, reading an Idea back from the Instance. If the Instance was the beholder's only source, the recovered Idea could be no more faithful than the Instance. But the Form is universal, sensed by every person. Reaching it directly, the beholder can correct the recovered Idea, which may then sit truer to the Form than the artist's own.
The beholder can then judge the work twice. The Instance is measured against the recovered Idea. This is the obvious judgment, where craft shows. The Idea is measured against the Form. This is the deeper one, and the difficulty in art is to find Ideas that are worth looking at while able to survive being made. What is then judged is not faithfulness to the artist but faithfulness to the Form.
So the work is seen twofold: at once a flawed Instance and a Form made visible. It is less a container for the Idea than a way of drawing attention to the Form behind it.