On Dec 21, 2009, at 2:33 PM, [email protected] wrote: > Yeah, it has the form of a dilemma, but there's no question in my mind: I > wouldn't burn the pages. We despise old Jock Murray for burning Byron's > memoir/diary; we're grateful that Max Brod disobeyed Kafka's dying wish that > all > he'd written should be burned. I wouldn't begin to feel I had the right to > impose my judgment on all those Shakespeare-lovers who would want WS's > explications, misguided though I myself might think they are -- misguided in > their > anticipation of happy and durable joy from reading them.
Let's skip over Miller's Tale--purloined from Dan Brown, it sounds--and get to another form of exactly what you, Cheerskep, are concerned about: the artist's commentary on his own work in progress. And let's do it in your own field, literature. James Joyce, no slouch writer, for sure, wrote but never published "Stephen Hero," which recounted the years of Stephen Dedalus at Trinity College. Joyce apparently was not satisfied with that effore and rewrote it extensively, eventually publishing it in 1916 as "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man." The SH ms was discovered after his death and edited and published posthumously by Theodore Spencer in 1945. There is your author's commentary in the form of an entire reinventing the work. Instead of an explication in the form of "What I'm thinking of is xxxxx and yyyyy," rather it takes the form of "I tried Stephen Hero, didn't like it, and prefer APOTAAAYM instead. You'll see what I mean... or maybe not." Where have we seen that in visual art? Rarely. Perhaps Leonardo's two versions of "Virgin of the Rocks" or of "Madonna and Child with St. Anne"? Or Clyfford Still's painted replicas of his own paintings? The latter seem not to have that critical element of reimagining a work. What about the effort of an artist who repaints the work of another, e.g., Picasso's reworking of a Jan Van Steen painting? Or the practice of making a series of paintings, which many artists adopted after WWII. Does the development of themes and motifs as the series progresses constitute a critical commentary by the artist? As for the larger question, why sequester or hide the artist's commentary? If the masses are misled, so be it. Typically, the "masses" don't understand the Riemann Hypothesis, or the difference between RNA and DNA, or why irradiating food is not harmful to people who handle or eat the food, or anything at all about Finnegan's Wake--so why withhold an artist's remarks? | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Michael Brady [email protected] http://considerthepreposition.blogspot.com/ http://thinkinglikeadesigner.blogspot.com/ Subscribe: [email protected] Unsubscribe: [email protected]
