on ne peut pas entendre entendere,» [3] which in English means «One can watch (someone) seeing; one cannot hear (someone) hearing.» This insight can be extended: One can in fact hear neither seeing or hearing. When the audience becomes silent just before a concert, one may actually hear how the people begin zu listen; however, this silence cannot be distinguished from the silence of visual concentration in a museum. Conversely, one can visually follow someone listening or watching: In the same way one can read the sequence of the elements being looked at and a person's emotional reaction to them from their eyes, one can also see how people listening to something turn their gaze inwards, because this is where the sounds occur, and one can gather the various reactions to what is being heard from their eyes.

During the reception process, the rapt silence in the spaces of a museum promotes the focus on visual contemplation. For his ironic project «Audio Recordings of Great Works of Art,» <> until 1999 the sound artist Ed Osborn <BIO NEU> collected sound recordings of the background noise in the immediate

proximity of central works of European art (including, of course, «Mona Lisa» in the Louvre) and discovered a complete indifference between sound environment and the content of the works of art.

It is somewhat different for the artistic production process. The sound of the brush, the graver, or of the hammer and chisel as well as the acoustic environment certainly affect the practicing artist. But in painting, it was Classic Modernism that first found its way to an explicitly structural parallel to music beyond the representational, oftentimes symbolic depiction of musicians, instruments, and listeners. Cirluonis and Kandinsky, [4] for example, translated musical experience into abstract color patterns which reproduce sound impressions and temporal proportions.

These artists of the early twentieth century made reference to a fundamental connection between the arts: that as in music, similar temporal processes occur in paintings, sculptures, and photographs. From this point of view, the production and reception of fine art are both activities that are acted out in time and that exhibit parallels to following a narration, a