What humans experience as aboutness is the result of, and emerges with the decoupling of stable memories from an always unstable here-and-now. Perceptual stimuli are processed simultaneously, and in parallel, by two (sub)systems. While the first allows us to recognize reality in terms of more or less stable memory systems, the second system makes us experience reality as an always novel combination of the memories available. Insofar as reality does not coincide with it, memory cannot but be about reality. It clearly is not reality itself, yet it allows us to recognize, to know it. Which is what the concept of aboutness… is about. The fact that humans do not only ‘think reality’, but can also think about it, makes human cultural cognition intentional.It is argued that the artefact is a basic sign type. It aligns logically with the three better-known sign types: the iconic, the symbolic, and the graphic (indexical). Specific attention will be devoted to the artistic semiosis. Art can be considered a test case for a cognitive semiotic approach that strives to take into account all the relevant dimensions of the human sense making process. Semiotics has not been able to deal adequately with the artistic, as it lacked insight into the sign-as-artefact – the sign type that is constitutive of the artistic semiosis. The revaluation of the artefact as sign will eventually lead to a critical revision of the triadic and dyadic models that have been dominating the semiotic scene for such a long time already.