  If the artwork is an autonomous entity that stands-in-itself and does not refer to anything outside itself, what of art’s speculative capacity to refer to other complexes beyond its immediate horizon? The theological notion of a host can dissolve the inconsistency. On the one hand, for an artwork to have a speculative capacity, it must invoke perimeters of meaning which transcend its own immediate circumstance. Without this, an artwork cannot connect us with frameworks of otherness. Yet this argument threatens to turn Gadamer’s aesthetics into an idealism referring specifically to the idea which the artwork was invoking. Art would once again be subordinated to a vehicle of philosophy. On the other hand, there is something within the constitution of an artwork that makes it resist theoretical reduction. Its invocation of an excess of meaning resists conceptual capture. This brings us to the crux of the matter. Does the excess of meaning which a work can speculatively invoke exist apart from the work that summons them? The speculative dimensions of art suggest that an artwork is indeed a host for that which lies beyond it and yet, at the same time, the transcendent dimensions of meaning (its excess of meaning), remain immanent within the work that invokes them. The presence of the transcendental only manifests itself through the work that hosts it. To put it another way, it is in the work that the transcendental set of meanings achieves its presence. The full resonance of a subject-matter which of course extends well beyond any one work is nevertheless only discernible in the works that host them. Indeed, subject-matters do not exist apart from the works that manifest their presence. Ontologically speaking they inhere within the work. The work is the occasion in which these dimensions of meaning appear and they command the attention of the viewer so long as the work holds them in play. In other words, with regard to the tension between representation and presentation in Gadamer’s position, the speculative charge of artworks does indeed suggest that they function as representational signs always referring beyond the given meaning. Yet this is another way of saying that, ontologically speaking, artworks function as symbols. Considered as a referential sign, what the artwork refers to is not a world independent of the sign but another set of signs. However, such other configurations of meaning may mean more than the signs that invoke them but they are inherent within those very signs. In other words, the very signs which refer speculatively to other dimensions of meaning also function symbolically in that the other horizons of meaning invoked are immanent within the work’s autonomy. As a symbolic host, the artwork holds that which refers beyond itself within itself.