Communication by art

From Gombrich The story of art

... the pre-Columbian Americans were perfectly capable of representing the human face in a lifelike manner. [...] If most works of these civilizations look remote and unnatural to us, the reason lies in the ideas they were meant to convey.

Art conveys ideas (information?) but we don't get them because we don't have the context.

We know very little about these mysterious origins, but if we want to understand the story of art we do well to remember, once in a while, that pictures and letters are really blood-relatives.