My response to this question is more about art and science than communications per se. Art and science are highly specialized versions of everyday experience. While science emphasizes facts and theories and art emphasizes a deeper engagement of phenomenological variables that cannot be communicated with words alone. But both are, of course, necessary for a meaningful life (Thoughts [as in science] without content are empty; intuitions [as in art] without concepts are blind. (Kant, Critique of Pure Reason)

Scientists are of course aware of the limits of their traditional media and admire other forms of representation when they resonate with their own beliefs: the AAAS/NSF visualization challenges are a high profile but by no means unique testament to this. In all cases great art and science create more-or-less satisfying experiences: scientists endeavor to tell “the best story they can with the best evidence available.” But these apply in different spheres: someone said, “art is I and Science is we” (probably Claude Bernard).

Of course, old evidence is always being replaced and new evidence is forever emerging. But in the end, the goal of writers, actors, artists, and storytellers should be — as Shakespeare wrote — “to hold, as ’twere, the mirror up to nature; to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image.” Representing art and nature in our minds—the mirror—is our minds doing what minds do: abstract the impossible diversity of nature into what is most relevant to us at a given moment (consciously or not).

Resonance between science and art has a poster child in the relationship between Claude Bernard and Emile Zola — the most celebrated scientist and author of their time: Zola was inspired in his beliefs outlined in The Experimental Novel by Claude Bernard’s seminal work, Introduction to Experimental Medicine.

About communication, Eugene Delacroix, among the greatest 19th C. Romantic artists, said that “…painting, the material thing called painting [is] no more than the pretext, than the bridge between the mind of the painter and that of the spectator.” In another place, Delacroix spoke to beauty as a judgement: “Of which beauty will you speak? There are many: there are a thousand: there is one for every look, for every spirit, adapted to each taste, to each particular constitution.” It is easy then to ask not “what is art” but what is NOT art,” at least in a given situation where a phenomenon captures your interest and imagination. (“All truths dwell in all things”—Walt Whitman)