"Communicating emotion" - enough already!

People talk a lot about "communicating emotion" through creative works - music, painting, photography etc. Personally, I find the "emotions" thing a bit twee, a bit illusory and certainly very self-centered. For me, the question is what is the "state" elicited by a particular work in people who are seeing it or hearing it?

Talking images, for example, I find a perfectly-executed portrait or landscape or product shot generally tends to elicit what I would call a completed state; I may linger and look at the detail, I may think "that's nice" or "great image" and I may even get excited or I may laugh, but I end up feeling that I've "got it" and moving on. The loop of noticing, looking, processing, and understanding closes.

What interests me far more are images that elicit an incompleted state, where the loop remains open - especially photos that are ambiguous or don't strictly confirm to the normal criteria of technical excellence. A photo that has the mojo evokes what feels like a (neurological) state of potential, of receptivity; I'm not just "consuming" the photo passively, and I'm just not doing a technical appraisal of it. Somehow the photo sets off a cascade of conscious and unconscious activity, mental, emotional ... maybe even spiritual.