I clearly and fully agree with Cheerskep. No one can begin an artwork without some idea or intention even if that intention is limited to the first mark, color, word, etc. Then comes the next mark, and so on. Each time the intent may change as do the author's judgments and interpretations, however slight. Again, in the end none of this can be guaranteed as 'conveyed' or be assured to incite similar notions in the audiences. How they and the author ever happen to agree is due to broad and influential contexts of culture-society in the sense that everyone is subject to the nature of their era and the learned knowledge of facts. By facts I mean the physical facts of things in the world.
In the old-fashioned methodologies of art history, for instance, students were taught to first take note of the physical facts of an artwork: what is made from, what size, condition, and provenance it has; then who made it, when, where, for whom, etc. This can be an exhaustive list and none of it is irrelevant. This is knowledge. It is culturally indifferent because it has little to do with interpretation. But it is also recursive in the sense that any artwork embeds the traces of earlier artworks in a range of ways both simple and very complex. Interpretation involves additional and more subjective issues. Interpretation is not knowledge proper. It is inventive, imaginative, often poetic. Meaning is the construction one makes by conflating knowledge with imagination. And that's where everything becomes discursive. wc ----- Original Message ---- From: "[email protected]" <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Sent: Sat, October 27, 2012 8:53:33 AM Subject: Re: "The problem with Hegelbs aesthetics is the assumption that the truth of a work of art emerges completely via its conceptual Joseph quotes Christopher Willard: > - Without intent all painting is meaningless. > > Depending on what he has in mind, Willard's line sounds tautological, trivial, and, if it is interpreted as saying you mustn't start a work without knowing "where it is going", in many cases his dogma is damaging.
