Week 8

 Auteur theory, or the idea that the person who creates the more iconic part of a piece is the "author" of the piece. This can lead to people searching for what inspired the artist to create their work and placing much of that value in their biographies. Some passing even that happened when they were a child, suddenly becomes a huge iconic part of their lives that defines their success. Depending on how dangerous the "defining" event was, people may even try to replicate it, in hopes to be just like their heroes. People value the work they consume because, for some of them, it changed their ideas on issues or helped to support them through a rough time. Unfortunately, authors are people too and they can say and do things that the fans may question so they attempt to remove the author from their work.When this happens, the reader can see the more surface level themes of the book that they may have been blind to when they were, well, blindly supporting the author. An example of this is the Harry Potter series. After the author expressed her views on transgender people, fans of her work made the choice to separate her from her work. In doing so, the fans have to look into elements of the work they were previously unintentionally ignoring. After all, they no longer have the image of the pure person that obstructed their view of the whole piece. This led to people reading the parts where the person breaking a race out of slavery was mocked and the racist name of a Chinese character being Cho Chang. The point of interpretation is to understand the piece and how the arts impact will affect people. If people interpret a part differently in the past, versus current sensibilities.

Comments

  1. Jamie TorrezOctober 16, 2020 at 7:39 PM

    Hi Nathan!

    I really enjoyed the point you brought up about how closely people will follow an author. It’s a little scary that people will replicate someone just because of their success. I never really thought about how one's view of the author could blind them to various themes. Since you are discussing content with a recognizable creator, I was wondering if you think content with an anonymous creator inherently requires better interpretation to be made?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. SoarxisscaredOctober 18, 2020 at 7:54 PM

      Content with a more anonymous creator or content that doesn't have a huge mainstream appeal, tends to focus more on the piece itself. Since the focus is more directed to the piece itself or the amount of people invested in the work limits how many people investigate and interview the creator, the attention is focused on the work.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Week 3 The Aura

Image
van Gogh, Vincent . The Starry Night. 1889, oil on canvas, Museum of Modern Art, New York. Reading "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" has really opened my eyes to how mechanical reproduction has impacted the art industry. To quote Walter Benjamin, "The uniqueness of a work of art is inseparable from its being embedded in the fabric of tradition" Arts traditions give the art its value, as it is the culmination of decades of experimentation and passing down methods. Not only this, but certain charms and imperfections of the original are lost in a reprint. A great example of this are pieces that use impasto, such as Vincent van Goghs "Starry Night". Impasto is a technique that uses thick brush strokes, whose depth can be seen throughout the piece, Yet in many reprints of impasto pieces, the quality that made them more visually dynamic is lost. All of the small imperfections and techniques used to make the original give it an "aurora...
Read more

Week 12 Apply and Reflect

Image
 As we read about gender and how society viewed gender, it made me wonder if there were any exhibits for transgender people in museums. I did a bit of digging and found the following exhibit in the New York City's New Museum; Consciousness Razing—The Stonewall Re-Memorialization Project . This not only documents parts of Stonewall, but also a slew of ever changing pieces (Morely, 2018). The pieces constantly shift and change to reflect how gender and the times shifts and change for the future. Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt’s gleaming gutter rats (Courtesy the New Museum)  This museum features pieces from 13 different artists, including Nicki Green, Chris Bogia, and Jibz Cameron. The piece featured, Gleaming Gutter Rats by Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt, portray queer people as shining rats. The exhibit itself is more meant to create the feelings that stonewall invoked rather than creating a memorial or recreating the scene in general (Morely, 2018). I wish that trans related things were not...
Read more