Roland Barthes' "The death of the Author" seems to establish that authorial power is communitary and that authorship belongs to audiences who can deconstruct the narrative possibilities of a work of art beyond the context of the narratives instantiated by the Author or painter or Sculptor, or Director of a work of art.
I am not sure if Barthes is basically saying that something can be dissected and deconstructed ad infinitum in ways that organize new meanings and that freedom or play belongs to the Audience, or if he's mimicing Thus Spake Zarathustra with the notion that the rigid formalism of Art was a dead art, such that with respect to the grand narratives of a tradition, "God ((The voice of unification and individuation at the precipice of a prioritization of the alleged creator of a message or set of messages, is exhaustively the author such that the voice of that author bears no weight and ....)) is dead"
Today there is a link between artist intention and technology as well.
Artists are creating works that use artificial life or artificial intelligence techniques to think about what the audience says and generate new responses not explicitly programmed into the system.
http://www.interactivestory.net/papers/deeperconversations.html
That's BRILLIANT Krishnan Thanks so much! Thanks for the link!
Thank you George for your wonderful answer! I am unclear about your last point how does the author mediate for the difference between author intentions and audeince variety, mediated by achieving what considerations or tactics?
No, text cannot "be dissected and deconstructed ad infinitum". There are according to Barthes readerly and writerly texts (and Fiske later added producerly text for popular cultural texts). It depends on the text if reconstruting is necessary or makes sense. What is indeed dead is not so much the author as the producer of a text, but the notion of a single instance (person) who expresses him/herself in a text. The production and reception of creative text (not just literature, also film, tv, music etc.) is a bit more complicated and has to include the recipient - at least this my reading of Barthes.
Look at Blanchot’s The Space of Literature. The relationship of the artist to the work is in the creation, but once the work is done it is independent from the creator. It enters the world as its own entity. This is where the ambiguity lies. It id from the artist but no longer of the artist. So that if the author changes her/his opinion of a subject they have published work on. The work doesn’t change with their opinion, the work is the work.
Meaning is found in the relationship of the encounter between the work and the audience. So that like memory it will always be transforming whenever it is accessed. Blanchot states that part of what the author does when writing is place themselves in the role of ‘reader yet to come’ and as such anticipates how the text will be read, but doesn’t guarantee how it is interpreted by anyone. We all know that reading, seeing a movie or playing a game is a solitary venture as an experience. So of course how each of us interprets a work will be unique to ourselves. the point is not that the author is dead, but rather that the reader is active.
Of course it is not solitary. Instead of solitary I should say individual. Given this how we interpret a work will be influenced by how it is framed and what is accepted wisdom on the work. I do not mean to say that cultural milieus don’t exist, but rather that the significance of the work is found in the relationship of the reader/viewer and the work. At the end of the day how a book or experience movie is uniquely individual.
Thank you D. Katherine Griggs and Kenneth Feinstein for your marvelous contributions to my inquiry.
Peter, as an art historian, I believe that a successful work of art is one which its interpretations are derived from angles that are not initially presumed by its maker. The techniques employed by the artist may not conform to standard conventions of communication, yet they pass powerful messages to different audience. This is because, one work of art may have multiple audience which are approaching it from different view points, depending on their cultural backgrounds and experiences in life. It stands to reason therefore, that all that you mentioned above comes into play in attempt to establish a meaningful art. Hence, contextual analysis must be approached from the side of an artist's intentions, cultural factor/conventions particularly as it relate to communication, and the view point of different audience on the art work.
Thank you Kunde for your insightful response to my question!
Kunde's answer is indeed intersting as it implies an interesting fact: the notion of great art is art that transcends space and time. Art that has meaning beyond the conception advanced by the artists. The value of the Winged Victory is that it say so much more than the commemoration of a given naval battle.
Great art is applicable to situation that are not those described by the work. Anna Karinina tells us much more than simply the social barriers to an impossible situation. And as such helps each new reader to apply those situation to understanding her own situation and beyond that certain truths about the give and take required to survive.
So with each new audience comes a new response and a new meaning. So long as the work continues to elicit such responses, it is alive.
Kunde may have a good point seemingly but the real appeal is to art that is situated in a time and place, not in one that transcends the fixed elements of time being, association and the relegation of ambient facts. Consider the Mona-Lisa it doesn't "Transcend time and space" It occupies a very important time and place and is organized about a relational admixture of salient facts, to everything from construction to placement to the history of owners of the piece, to a formulation of simple elements that configure to combine the surface aesthetic to the historicity of the work of art, as a placement in a specific historical narrative...perhaps even in the sense of narratives that compete with one another.
To be a living work of art it's not the interpretation of the audience alone, but the pulse of the work, the fixed formal structuralist accounting of form and structure that grants ordinential functioning to the structure of matters in relation to matters of applications in more than the imagination....but in the historic periphery of a work's dominant contexts. The work is of course not dead without an audience, it's just in a state of suspended animation in one aspect of it's meaning creation. Formally structurally what something reduces to depends on our formal account of organization and it's meaning. As a Hylozoist I believe the work has a life independent of an audience, the body or corpus of a work of art must not be confused with what it does. The person adept at the tripple long jump is not the same as the person, it's a functional achievement of the person...so too the work of art in the audiential realm is a function or feature of a leap into certain achievements but as to whether or not we require the approval of an audience for this to be apparent showcases the structure of a growing application that conscripts approval from the formulaic and where not formulaic the constructed by stochastic elements in either case deconstructable from the perspective of what the work of art is in itself.... if a drawing or painting a collection of marks made in the service of conveying structure or the absence of structure, if a sculpture, forms protrusions and indentations and negative space designed to organize the impression of relations of structure, to an overarching set of key ideas. While the notions on the general impression of a work of art may change from era to era, it's core ideas remain with the work of art's technical achievements. The Pieta is not a sculpture of an oceanic scene, theme and a fixed iconography keeps certain contexts rigged in the sense of the Iconographic biases keeps a work from its iconoclasms, or dedicated to those Iconoclasms. FORM is Meaning, and meaning is Form independent of the audience too.
Dear Peter,
Depends on your philosophical approach:
- a work of art may never leave an artist mind?
- or is it interaction with a public (semiotics) (significance of form)?
- An object is required first of all (without it becomes quite metaphysical!)
- and there is the psychoanalytic approach that says that artist don't know- nor the public- what art is about and only a psychoanalytic theory can shed light on the question.
- and there are many, many other ways of seeing art...
The choice is yours.
Best regards,
Willy
Frankly art work rating is based on situations and ambiance at which it is being valued. The artist's intention and audience's direct input are perception driven, while the convention is evaluated on skill and state of art / edge over technology being used. Hence which takes precedence does not matter, in this commercial world, art is rated by the "beholder of wealth", who is inclined to make the purchase.
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