No one can find the author's intent, not even the author. What is found is the reader's intent, which is interpretation. wc
----- Original Message ---- From: Tom McCormack <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Sent: Wed, April 4, 2012 5:02:02 PM Subject: Re: "...If you can discover an author's intent in the work that you are observing and find personal resonance with that message, then it transcends the medium to become art." A fuller quote from the video-game designer whom Artsy6 quotes is this: "In my opinion, the term art is a very subjective term. It means something very different to anyone that tries to apply it to works of beauty and in their life. My definition is quite serviceable for myself, which is quiet simply to say if you can discover an author's intent in the work that you are observing and find personal resonance with that message, then it transcends the medium to become art. So it's very difficult to say which games are art, which games are not art." The speaker is right in his belief that there is no absolute quality of "artness", or category of artworks, up in Plato's heaven. But he then let's the reifying persuasion of language carry him into declaring that some things "become art", and some games "are art". All he's entitled to say is that some people will CALL a given work "art", and others won't. The real betrayal of the shallowness of the speaker's thinking is revealed by his asserting that if you "find personal resonance with an author's intent/message", that makes it "art". But suppose a writer has a very strong affinity with the "message" of a given political candidate, and he has written a novel echoing that message. Suppose further that everyone in the media and on this forum agrees the novel is irremediably awful. It is silly to believe that those readers who agree with the political message but loathe the novel would nevertheless call it art because the message has "personal resonance' (?) for them.
