Reflection 5

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

Before delving into the readings in this section, I examined what exactly I thought about this question. My first inclination was towards the idea that the artist is a key figure in the meaning of an art work. In terms of a song’s lyrics, the plot of a play, or a the characters in a novel, there seems to be no one with a fuller understanding of the meaning of a line, the intricacies of a story device, or the nature of a character. The artist, playwright, or novelist knows better than anyone what was meant in each case. A fiction writing professor once told my class that we knew our characters better than anyone else. He said this in an effort to make the point that we understood motives of our characters better than our readers did and it was our job to give the readers that understanding. In terms of the plastic arts, I also found upon initial reflection that I rely on the artist’s interpretation of the work before thinking about my own. For example, a painting’s title will heavily influence what I see in it. I feel this hesitance and dependence is due to my concern that I am not the most artsy or art-educated person in the world. Therefore, I first depend on any hint the artist gives in the title or placards, and then from there do the typical “I know it’s supposed to be a cloud but to me it looks like a-” fill in the blank. On the other hand, my next thought was the idea of high school literary analysis. As an English major, I’m all for literary analysis were literary analysis is due. However, just as any English professor will tell you, not every story by every author - and not even every story by every good author begs analysis. In the high school classroom, in the world overrun with curriculum requirements, a student finds themself often questioning why exactly we must analysis every little “symbol”. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. And in that case, and many more valid ones, there is more emphasis on how a group of people read a certain text then there is on what the author/artist actually meant. The same is true of common and important art criticism when it comes to the plastic arts.

Nehamas turns out to use examples that are very much so in line with my initial thoughts on the subject. He writes about the relationship between the author, the reader, and the text. He offers up three ways of considering the meaning maker of a text. First, pluralism is the idea that each reader makes their own meaning and has their own reading of each text, all of which are correct. Limited pluralism is the idea that the reader, based on rules of language and the language used in the text, determines the meaning of the text. And last monism is the idea the author is the only person who can make the meaning of text, and as such the meaning of the text is always unattainable. I personally come down on neither of these sides, but rather I agree more with the idea that the meaning is made by the reader in reference to an abstracted author who is not necessarily the specific author of the text but rather the author whose presence is clear in the text itself.  

In Kant’s writings, I was able to see a different perspective via the focus on beauty and the physical arts. His demand that art be intentional in order to be fine art was intriguing and problematic for me. I realize that there is the distinction between art and beauty and that natural beauty is highly regarded, however I took issue with the idea, because an “artist” can pick up anything in the natural or manmade world, put it on a pedestal and suddenly that’s both intentionality and art. I found this all hard to reconcile, though I’m not sure it’s really too problematic to the overall claim. Nevertheless, I found Nehemas’s viewpoint most accessible and applicable to my initial concerns as they were namely considering literature. I feel that the question of meaning in the plastic arts is far less pressing, as they are either entirely straight forward or completely beyond any interpretation that would make sense.