On Oct 25, 2012, at 12:58 PM, saul ostrow <[email protected]> wrote:
> I do not think we should reduce the work of art to the individual creative > initiative of its author either - the key word I think is the idea of > revealing the text - which implies that the text is concealed within what > the author does You make it seem like the "text" is contained within the artwork in some definite way, rather than being re-instantiated every time when the work is perceived again--and thus the text is not "concealed" at all but latent in some way within the viewer's actions. If you are thinking of the relatively unchanging aspects of a work--the fixed written words, the depicted images--you are thinking of the "triggers" that provoke the viewer's interpretation. I believe that every work contains relatively permanent and knowable features within its material form, which the viewer can (or does) access and reconstruct a "meaning" (or "text") that other viewers also reconstruct, so the work is generally recognizable as "meaning" the same thing. | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Michael Brady
