Earlier chapters have enabled us to put the long history of art into a context of both dual expression and the struggle against the tyrannies of time and place. This chapter begins with a summary of prior arguments about this with discussions of ritual and the importance of place. Then I refresh our memories about the graphic elements in aspects of communication usually better known for other features. Writing was important both in being relatively persistent and in fixing stories, but also freeing stories from attachment to particular places. Printing then enabled people to free the stories from particular structures of control, such as the church, and it became possible for the stories to be spread far and wide. There was still a problem of time—the stories could not be disseminated rapidly across distances, until the widespread use of the semaphore and then electric and electronic transmission. This would be an attractive story if it were one of the gradual evolution of ways of permitting people to see art, but there was no straightforward sequence in any one place. Rather I describe here the elements that make up the present means of knowing about art, and in doing so, I want to draw attention to the futility of placing emphasis on the art of the last 300 years in Europe and America (primarily) when we need to consider how that sits within the whole range of art around the world and at different times. I then move to discuss the concept of “meaning” in art and emphasize that the result of the early history of mark-making was to ensure that when people made deliberate marks the seers of those marks would expect that there would be an associated meaning. Yet the specific meaning could be lost without knowledge of the stories that accompanied the mark-making. Thus, two concepts go together: the expectation of “meaning” and the indeterminacy of “meaning.” I then discuss ways in which scenes and the stories that can be read from them and the narratives that accompany them reduce the extent of the indeterminacy, and in appropriate cultural contexts can remove it altogether.