Arthur C. Danto, answered from the texts and cited to the page.
An artwork is about something — it has aboutness in the way that a sentence is about its subject matter or a thought is about its object.1 But what distinguishes an artwork from a sentence or a thought is that the artwork embodies its meaning rather than merely describing it. The meaning is not separable from the sensuous form in which the artwork is realised; the sensuous form is part of how the meaning is what it is.
Goya's Disasters of War etchings are about the atrocities of the Peninsular War, but they embody what they are about in a way that no propositional summary of the atrocities could match — the embodied meaning is a different kind of meaning from the descriptive meaning, and it is the kind of meaning that artworks uniquely have. Interpretation is therefore constitutive of the artwork's being an artwork: to see an artwork as the artwork it is, is to read it through to its meaning in the way that Lydia Goehr describes through the rhetorical figure of ekphrasis — seeing through the sensuous form to the meaning that the form embodies. Interpretive seeing is not the addition of interpretation to a separately existing object; it is the perceptual-and-cognitive mode peculiar to the apprehension of art.23 This is why artworks require interpretation in a way that mere things do not.45
I then thought that, unlike sentences with subjects and predicates, the meanings are embodied in the object that had them. I then declared that works of art are embodied meanings. Most philosophers of language are fixed on semantics, analyzing sentences in such a way that the subject falls within the scope of the predicate.Wakeful Dreams, pp. 38–39
To seek a neutral description is to see the work as a thing and hence not as an artwork: it is analytical to the concept of an artwork that there has to be an interpretation. To see an artwork without knowing it is an artwork is comparable in a way to what one's experience of print is, before one learns to read; and to see it as an artwork then is like going from the realm of mere things to a realm of meaning.Transfiguration of the Commonplace, p. 135
Hers is against a notion of interpretation which makes the artwork as an explanandum—as a symptom, for example. My theory of interpretation is instead constitutive, for an object is an artwork at all only in relation to an interpretation. We may bring this out in a somewhat logical way. Interpretation in my sense is transfigurative.The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art, pp. 45–46
We can of course imagine someone in the spirit of philosophical counterinstantiation painting a work about nothing. But there is a problem of distinguishing between not being about anything and being about nothing, and I incline to the view that nothing is what the painting is about, as in an essay by Heidegger. So my challenge to Dickie would be: give me an example, and I will deal with it.The Madonna of the Future, pp. 21–22
And this would be like someone who, in contrast with Menard and out of springs of invention one can hardly guess at, wrote in ignorance of the original something we might consider indiscernible from Don Quixote. These are by now familiar extensions of Wélfflin's thought that not everything is possible at every time.Transfiguration of the Commonplace, p. 123
The aboutness-embodiment-interpretation triad is the positive content of the Transfiguration-era theory and the Embodied Meanings (1994) programme. Goehr's ekphrasis reading developed the position humanistically; Mark Rollins worked on the cognitive content side; the Brands developed the surface/deep distinction; Costello raised the beauty problem that prompted my The Abuse of Beauty response. The position is contested by formalists (the meaning is not embodied, it is supplied by the perceiver), by Goodman's symbol-systems alternative (art is one kind of symbol-system among many), and by Walton's make-believe theory. The embodied-meaning approach remains the most influential contemporary alternative to formalism in analytic aesthetics.