Art enables people to talk about the past and the future as well as the present—to reflect on them. Art is a system of meanings communicated to members of society such that anyone seeing it knows something about that society’s values, even if they do not know all of them. I call this “dual expression” to refer to the thing itself and the idea associated with it. Stories make marks art. The people who make the object can think about it, engage in an “actual process of thought,” and tell stories about it. This process of thought requires a much more complex cognition than any other animal has been shown to engage in. We take many things for granted about communication. Many of them derive, ultimately, from the discovery of the dual expression that allows people to use things and their literal surfaces to communicate visually, even in ways that are not worth a thousand words for every viewer. In the variation of dual expression, the literal surface can remain the same but the deeper cognitive meanings can change through the associations of ritual. In early revolutions, art combined with ritual to fix both story and ritual in a particular place and generate the reflections we now take for granted. Ritual had an unexpressed function to provide validation for the associations between the stories and the material expression of them through the art.