Authors and artists should keep their mouths shut when it comes to "explaining" their art. However, I don't think they can "falsify" it since the reading is up to the viewer and thus integrated with the his or her subjectivity. The author/artist makes the work and then it takes on a life in the world at which point the authorship -- and intentions -- diminish and then vanish. Afterwards, talk about authorship with respect to a work is simply gossip. WC
----- Original Message ---- From: Michael Brady <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Sent: Tue, December 22, 2009 6:58:45 PM Subject: Re: The harm of author commentary On Dec 22, 2009, at 6:58 PM, [email protected] wrote: > Aw, shoot, Michael, I thought I took a useful shot at giving a number of > reasons why I think there will be greater joy in this world if authors issued > less commentary on their own works. I said: > > bbWhen a work is creative, made-up, rinsing out the ambiguities and > multiple possible interpretations is often the wrong thing to do. Its effect > is to > dilute and to falsify.b > > Consider the young student who reads Othello and is told that Shakespeare > stated, bIts meaning is that jealousy is bad.b "Is told"? Who does the telling? That's just poor teaching, frankly. I learned in high school to discern fallacious, illogical, or erroneous arguments. Argumentation was part of composition classes, as a matter of fact, and we were shown how to recognize such ploys as appeals to authority, vanity, fear, etc., what we called "glowing generalities," irrelevant facts, non sequiturs, etc. I would not be leary of Shakespeare's commentaries on, let's say, Othello or Julius Caesar, so long as they were presented as useful background information, like other historical facts about the making of the plays, but not as specially determinative. My literature courses carefully delineated the major fallacies of interpretation (intentional, institutional, biographical, and such.) Again, if gullible people interpret gullibly, that's their problem. BTW, it's also useful to bear in mind that a visual artist's commentary about a single work is significantly different than a writer's comments about a play--wasn't that Miller's germ of a story?--because the play is reinterpreted by the actors and directors at every performance and staging, in and of itself a massive critical construction of the play, whereas a painting or sculpture typically stands as a unique entity, instantiated only once (excepting the issuing of editions of prints or making casts from a mold, a much different undertaking than putting on a play or performing a musical work). | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Michael Brady [email protected] http://considerthepreposition.blogspot.com/ http://thinkinglikeadesigner.blogspot.com/ Subscribe: [email protected] Unsubscribe: [email protected]
