Neither the writer nor the artist of the painting in question seems to have ever heard of Reader Response criticism'. Reader Response criticism counters the idea of the so-called New Criticism (which asserted that meaning was in the text) and instead claims that the reader creates the meaning for the text and may invent a new meaning in each reading. It also claims that the author creates a meaning for the text, and a new meaning for each reading of it. What this does is to destabilize meaning by claiming it can't exist as stable and identifiable in the text, but in the reader and the author where it is also unstable. When the writer can interpret the painting as Obama being alarmed by the 'burning of the Constitution (by others) and the artist claims that his intention is to embed meaning in the artwork (Obama burns the Constitution) both are ignoring the critical position that meaning is always unstable. Both artist and writer are right and wrong. Not only are both interpretations 'correct' but there are still many more that could also be 'correct' because each reading/viewing of the painting elicits reader/viewer associations to private and public experience. And both are 'wrong' for the same reasons. With Derrida and other 'deconstructionists' who focus on the fallacy that binary opposites are truly opposites by showing that such opposites rely on rhetoric or figurative (metaphorical) language and are therefore too ambiguous to be true opposites, the essential uncertainty of any binary opposite pairing (Obama burns the Constitution or Obama doesn't burn the Constitution) reveals a remainder of alternatives, what Derrida called Differance. This painting makes a fine 'exhibit A' for a discussion of critical theory and deconstructionism. Of course, I could be wrong even though I am also right.
It troubles me that a presumably well-paid journalist is seemingly ignorant of literary criticism of the sort usually covered in a survey course on the topic. wc ----- Original Message ---- From: joseph berg <[email protected]> To: aesthetics-l <[email protected]> Sent: Tue, April 17, 2012 5:15:12 AM Subject: "It's bad art because it does not create belief in the fiction that the artist has rendered. Instead, the artist's belief must be explained" http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/culturemonster/2012/03/why-a-painting-of-president-obama-with-a-burning-constitution-is-junk.html
