The genre of blankness— silent compositions, white canvases, blank books, empty pages—crops up again and again in the art world, fascinating and rankling us perhaps more than any other kind of art. “4’33” ” is Cage’s most famous composition; Robert Ryman’s all-white paintings have sold for over $1 million at auction. These works raise dizzying questions: How does not writing a poem qualify as poetry? Once one painter proffers a white canvas, how does another artist’s blank canvas add anything? If blank works look and sound the same, how can some be considered satirical, some mournful, and some exuberant?

Craig Dworkin, an English professor at the University of Utah, has dedicated an entire new book to picking apart what’s going on in these works where, seemingly, nothing’s going on at all. In “No Medium,” he examines art such as Robert Rauschenberg’s 1953 “Erased de Kooning Drawing”; literary works like French psychoanalyst Gérard Wajcman’s “L’interdit,” a frequently blank novel about an amnesiac; and more than 60 silent compositions, from “Blank Tapes” by an Argentinian trio called Reynols to the moment of silence in Jean-Luc Godard’s film “Bande à part.”

In the process, he aims to show how these “equally unmarked pages can enact different significances,” and to explore just why they’re so provocative. The absences in blank art, Dworkin says, have an unusual power to overturn the notion of the artist as someone with new ideas, and thus can expose political and cultural fault lines that underlie both art and authorship.

Dworkin spoke with Ideas from his home in Utah. This interview has been condensed and edited.

IDEAS: How do you begin to evaluate a blank page?

DWORKIN: Their specifics are always going to be slightly different...[and] the social context and social circumstances in which that paper is encountered. The blank sheet of typing paper handed to you as a conceptual poem seems very different than the one handed to you by the clerk at Kinko’s, even those two sheets of paper are physically identical. I definitely think some are better than others.

IDEAS: How? What makes them better?

DWORKIN: [The Russian poet Vasilisk] Gnedov’s [1913] “The Poem of the End” [a blank poem that appeared at the end of a book]...is one of the most important blank literary pages [because] it establishes such a clear connection between the aspirations of an avant-garde, conceptual poetics and the conceptual avant-garde in the other arts....[It’s] imagining that literature could aim for a kind of radical degree zero that painting was aiming for at the time.

IDEAS: This impulse comes out of modernism, right? How did it arise?

DWORKIN: [There was] an impulse across the arts in modernism that would begin to pursue various genres of art to their most reduced essence. This is what we think of as [critic Clement] Greenberg’s insistence on the essence of the medium—the essence of sculpture is gravity, the essence of painting is the monochromatic plane of the canvas—[and] one way to think of the essence of the poem is to reduce it to it barest essence, which might be the page.

IDEAS: How have other artists received these works?

DWORKIN: Extreme or avant-garde works...[tend to] either seem momentously, deadly serious or completely goofy and hoax-like. It seems they work best in those moments when [these feelings] are unresolvable. John Cage was clearly a prankster and a Dadaist and a provocateur, but he played the role for so long that you started to believe that he was also really serious.

IDEAS: Cage’s work becomes important in the ’50s and ’60s. Why was this another boom time for blank and silent art?