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

Be they painter, composer, or writer, the artist is without a doubt the source of the work of art, at least in so much as it is a physical thing or has a physical manifestation. However, the artist does not give the meaning of the work of art, because this is not the nature of meaning. Meaning, whether in a linguistic or other semiological environment, is determined as a relation of the symbols to one another in a broader social context, and these symbols are not rigidly defined within their social context. As such, the person attending to the symbols determines the limits or overlapping of the symbols based on their own personal experience. The meaning is created through its reception in a viewer, not in its construction by the artist.

            Carroll makes an appeal to H.P. Grice’s theory of language in order to show that the artwork, particularly a literary work, has a determinate meaning. Grice says that a statement means p when A says something to B in order to make B believe that p by saying that something. What is important here is that the nature of everyday communication is not one-sided. The communicator A tries to express p, but this does not automatically mean that B will understand A’s utterance by how it is presented. When this is applied to a work of art, this becomes more problematic in that A, taking the form of the artwork, cannot provide feedback to B if B does not take away the ‘proper’ meaning. Carroll seeks to make literary works into conversational pieces, but he does not recognize that their status as works of art makes them different. In purely conversational speech, language is used as a piece of equipment; in poetry or prose, language is used for some effect beyond that of normal speech, hence its recognition as artwork. Thus, the artwork’s communication, by its ambiguous and opaque nature beyond mere equipmentality, opens up a wide range of possible meanings to be taken away from a single string of symbols, and the artwork cannot provide the feedback to ‘correct’ any interpretation.

            The author then might be able to come in and save the artwork from a seemingly anarchic multiplicity of meanings. The author is after all the one who made the thing to be interpreted. However, the author did not make the symbolic system into which the artwork is thrust, nor does she condition any particular viewer’s history of interaction with the words/images/colors/etc. Nehamas tries to thwart this by appeal to a postulated author, one who is not the author of the work but is the author in the work. This author, as an idealized entity, determines the meaning of the work by what he or she could have meant or what it could have meant to its particular audience at the time, and thus there is a sort of asymptotic ideal of what the work could mean. But this seems problematic as well. Given that nature of meaning in the Gricean terms requires the interpretation by a reader/viewer, the only people who could adequately meet the requirements of Nehamas’ ideal interpretation would be the hypothetical audience or author. Otherwise, all readers and viewers, even those who are very attentive to the historical context of the work, cannot help but bring to bear the own understandings or their own viewing of the work. As Devereaux noted in her work on the male gaze in art, there is no passive seeing, but only ways of seeing.

            Furthermore, Kant’s notion of artistic genius makes any authorial claim to meaning problematic. The Kantian genius is not a person, but more like a state of consciousness that some certain individuals have had that has allowed for the creation of works of art. This state, which produces artwork, is not explicable by the artists as to how and why they made it. So, if the method they have of producing what is artful about their creation is uncertain, and the meaning of the artwork is what makes it artful, then it follows that the artist is not in a position to explain what the meaning of the artwork is. Using the notion of genius, the artist makes the work, but then has to countersign that this work is in fact her production. In this countersigning, then, the artist comes to the same level of interpretive credibility as a well-informed critic.

The nature of art also is not one of a factical truth, as both Heidegger and Aristotle point out. What is there to be seen is not some one truth about a state of the world or one subjective opinion about that world, but rather an unveiling of Being as such. I think that Nehamas’ and Carroll’s insistence on some sort of authorial standard of meaning is a confusion brought about by the nature of language. Because the literary work makes use of tools used to communicate meaning for a different sort of purpose, there is a conflation of conversation usage with artistic truth which does not adequately account for the nature of the artwork. Art is semantically opaque and inexhaustible by its nature, and this comes out because it is made possible through the prescriptions of the artist, but rather through its perception by individual audience members.