I think you're nitpicking pointlessly here. Rather than seeking interpretations that you can be snide and cranky about, seek interpretations that make sense.
Literature is art, but literature isn't just a bucket of statements. Indeed, plenty of interesting literature makes use of things that aren't plain statements. If Upon a Winter's Night a Traveller, for example. Its title alone isn't a proper statement, and the book plays with that kind of incompleteness throughout.
The statement version of the book might be something like, "Incomplete statements can be interesting." But that's not art.
I don’t see an interpretation that makes sense. In fact, I don’t think there is one. I guess you define a “statement” to be a complete sentence, judging by “its title alone isn’t a proper statement”, but titles are rarely statements anyway and the actual contents of the novel, I am sure, are full sentences. We need to use more precise language, instead of hiding behind vague terms like “statements”, if we hope to evaluate the argument.
I am not nitpicking. I honestly don’t think any sense can be made from leot’s statement. If I am wrong, I invite you to refine it in a way that makes sense. Your earlier refinement (text is not the best medium for every message) makes sense, but the point is that art is not defined as “mediums other than text”, and therefore it isn’t relevant to the previous discussion about art.
Another (less lyrical) way of phrasing it might be:
"P1: There exists X in the set of (ideas, notions, feelings, etc.) s.t. X cannot be expressed as a combination of statements.
Humans get around P1 by using more than mere statements to express themselves. The consequences of their doing so might be called 'art'."
The word "statement", as opposed to "phrase" or "sentence", was used to draw a distinction between mere statements about facts-of-the-matter and literature. The implication was that "statements" are things like "the sky is blue" or "war is bad", from which semantics can be derived through syntax and the grounding of referents. In other words, I'm implying, here, that "literature" is not a simple collection of statements.
But regardless of the status of literature, i.e., even if literature were a mere collection of statements, are you claiming that every feeling, notion, idea (etc.) that can be expressed† can, in fact, be expressed via text/words/phrases? In other words, are you claiming that (a) language can express everything felt, thought, experienced? Or, alternatively, are you claiming (b) that no non-linguistic medium of expression can express that which is inexpressible by language?
†I'd use "communicated", but I fear someone might take the position that "communicate" only has a technical information-theoretic definition.
I thought he was was drawing a distinction between literal communication and evocation of experience and feeling. E.g., "war is bad" vs Guernica. I take it as linked in that I saw it as an argument for a broad understanding of art. E.g., if a big purple square of Rothko's is evocative, it's still worthwhile art even though any reasonable translation of it to unpoetic statements of it is either null or dull to the point of idiocy.
