Dual responsibility of an artist

Karissa Bowley

What role does the artist play in shaping the meaning of the work?

            The artist, as an agent, is an important link in the chain between inspiration—everything that came together to make that artist make that work at that particular moment—and effect on the viewer or reader—the thoughts and emotions that are evoked in a complex subject by the work itself. In one way, I think the artist channels something like a charge or pulse through him or her, making the artist a kind of path through which a message or meaning flows from one social positioning to another. In another way, the artist is a link in a chain with the power to redirect and control the meaning flowing through him or her to an extent. Being an artist, then, involves being inspired and then making decisions about how to channel certain feelings and ideas into a work. But more than this, being an artist involves being recognized as an artist to an extent, and so depends on effectiveness. I think that artists are most effective when they balance the element of surprise and the element of familiarity, slightly modifying the path of the electrical charge being sent through them, but not so much that the current can’t reach its primed receiver.

            The process, though, is an openended one, in which the message being transferred may not be one succinct idea, the artist may consciously convey some messages and subconsciously convey some messages, and the interpreters may decipher similar ideas to those the artist felt or may read completely different ideas into the work. Nehamas says that the openendedness of interpreting the meaning of an artwork mimics the “openendedness of all knowledge” (564). I think this is true because knowledge, even the factual kind of knowledge, is merely a stepping stone to more knowledge in the sense that one rarely declares oneself to be “done” with the process of acquiring it, or, if one does, that does not mean that the knowledge is actually complete but just that one is satisfied with it for the time being. Meaning in a work of art works the same way: even when thought to be complete, it very well might not be, and new interpretations can burst forth from older more routine ones. All this is to say that an artist is responsible for directing, and in some ways creating, the meaning of a work, but this process of creating does not lead to a particular destination, an ultimate meaning. Rather, the creative process is what directs the multiplicity of interpretations and is crucial to consider when searching for a viable possible meaning or the “best” possible meaning (which can probably never actually be reached). This makes sense with Nehamas’s assertion that “What a text means is what it could mean to its writer” (564). So we can never know all the circumstances and inspirations and feelings that an artist puts into his or her work, but nevertheless we assess the work partially based on the process of its creation because in trying to discover its possible destination/conclusion, we know that it is important to identify where it is coming from and how exactly it got there. The ongoing meanings we give works are bound both by the reader’s personal experience and the reader’s knowledge surrounding the art and artist.

            Kant’s concept of genius also reflects the idea of the artist as a skilled vehicle through which some concept(s) is transmitted by being somewhat transformed/redirected.  Art’s “finality in its form must appear just as free from the constraint of arbitrary rules as if it were a product of mere nature” (150). But at the same time, we must know deep down that the work is humanmade and not a product of nature. By copying the process of nature, the genius creates beautiful work because we are drawn in by the shocking and mysterious method of production it seems to indicate, while also feeling that some universal idea or theme is being portrayed. The artist, then, takes a process from nature—a seemingly incomprehensible way of ordering—and uses new methods to convey that process through uniquely human means. I think this is a good account of that unteachable, incomprehensible sense that the artists have that inspires them to combine certain materials in certain ways to make the point they wish to make. That skill that an artist seems to already possess is a skill in conveying the universal idea in a way that is inexplicable both surprising and pleasing. In Existential terms, the genius navigates his or her freedom in a field in such a way that both their liberty and their self-imposed constraints are obvious and communicative of some deeper idea and feeling.