“According to Jan Mukařovský, the work of art is perceived as such only against a more general background of significations, only as a systematic ‘deviation’ from a linguistic norm; as this background changes, interpretation and evaluation of the work change accordingly, to the point where it may cease to be perceived as a work of art at all. There is nothing, Mukařovský argues in Aesthetic Function, Norm and Value as Social Facts (1936) which possesses an aesthetic function regardless of place, time or the person evaluating it, and nothing which could not possess such a function in appropriate conditions. Mukařovský distinguishes between the ‘material artefact’, which is the physical book, painting or sculpture itself, and the ‘aesthetic object’, which exists only in human interpretation of this physical fact.”
— Terry Eagleton, “Structuralism and Semiotics,” Literary Theory: An Introduction
