"What makes the distinction between a suggestion and the telling of a specific story?" The relative shared Visual literacy of the artist and audience, possibly? Very little of the content in any Artwork can ever be self evident unless the viewer can draw on a common fount of imagery, colour identification, object/figure/context of setting/cultural avatars etc. I doubt that any image can have a universal appeal because of it's ability to tell a story, more likely, it might get a emotional response from it's colour, form and texture. A simple example would be, if a member worked in an traditional Australian Aboriginal style, the resulting image might move us because we can recognise the stylised animals and humans coupled with the earth colours and universal forms of dots and stripes, all points of reference that we can identify with. Very few folks would be able to extrapolate the meaning of the image. Such work would never find its way onto the Magazine cover in the current contest because the paradigm is very much a western mind set centred around imagery culled from folklore type vagaries about the spirituality of Mother-earth figures and other such archetypal yearnings that haunt the urbanised. To tell a story, we need shared signs and symbols, any other response is purely particular to the emotional interiority of the viewer. ...well that's what I think!