Phil. 1361

Dr. Cynthia Freeland

Paper #4 Topic

Orientation: This is an open topic and there are many ways to approach it. In your answer, do keep in mind the readings from Units 5 and 6 of our course. And do talk about some specific examples.

The Question:

What is involved in understanding the meaning of an artwork? Consider various ways of answering this question. Some possible answers would involve referring to the artist’s gender or sexual orientation, the artist’s general intentions, broader facts about the culture and social context, ways in which the work is exhibited or displayed, and/or features specific to the language of art itself (e.g., color, form, spatial representation, sources of imagery, etc.).

After surveying a variety of opinions on this issue, which one do you think is most useful, and why? (Or, if you think art does not really have “a” meaning, you can explain your reasons for that view, too.)

Directions: The paper should be about three pages long and it is worth 20 points. Please follow the Writing Tips. Be sure to discuss a variety of examples in your paper. Also, include at least a few of the quotations from the back of this page and explain both what they mean and how they are relevant to the issues you are discussing. Remember, do not plagiarize! (Plagiarism includes paraphrasing without proper citation.) Plagiarism is a violation of the university’s Academic Honesty Policy and the penalties are very serious, ranging from a zero in the assignment to expulsion

Due in Class Tuesday, November 21, 2006. Late papers will be marked down.

Selected Quotations from Writers in Units 5 and 6

In theory, museums are public spaces dedicated to the spiritual enhancement of all who visit them. In practice, however, museums are prestigious and powerful engines of ideology. They are modern ritual settings in which visitors enact complex and often deep psychic dramas about identity—dramas that the museum’s stated, consciously intended programs do not and cannot acknowledge overtly. Duncan, 117

Through their imagery, they [works by Picasso and de Kooning], they lay claim to public space as a realm under masculine control. Duncan, 126

In art history the status of an art work is inextricably tied to the status of the maker. Parker and Polllock, 50

The very fact that this recognition of quilts as art has been achieved by spotlighting the finished objects in isolation as a valuable commodity and by dissociating them from the means of their production shows how important the particular place and ways of making are to the definition of art. Parker and Pollock, 53

…In general, women’s experience and situation in society, and hence as artists, is different from men’s: certainly, the art produced by a group of consciously united and purposefully articulate women intent on bodying forth a group consciousness of feminine experience might be stylistically identifiable as feminist, if not feminine art. Nochlin 315

The language of art is, more materially, embodied in paint and line on canvas or paper, in stone or clay or plastic or metal—it is neither a sob story nor a hoarse, confidential whisper. Nochlin 316

Behind the most sophisticated investigations of great artists, more specifically, the art history monograph, which accepts the notion of the Great Artist as primary, and the social and institutional structures within which he lived and worked as mere secondary “influences” or “background,” lurks the golden nugget theory of genius and the free enterprise conception of individual achievement Nochlin 319

The author is the principle of thrift in the proliferation of meaning. Foucault 331

The author’s name manifests the appearance of a certain discursive set and indicates the status of this discourse within a society and a culture. Foucault 326

We now ask of each poetic or fictional text: From where does it come, who wrote it, when, under what circumstances, or beginning with what design? The meaning ascribed to it and the status or value accorded with it depend on the manner in which we answer these questions. And if a text should be discovered in a state of anonymity…the game becomes one of rediscovering the author. Foucault 327-8

…these aspects of an individual which we designate as making him an author are only a projection, in more or less psychologizing terms, of the operations that we force texts to undergo, the connections that we make, the traits that we establish as pertinent, the continuities that we recognize, or the exclusions that we practice. Foucault 328

…I seem to call for a form of culture in which fiction would not be limited by the figure of the author. It would be pure romanticism, however, to imagine a culture in which the fictive would operate in an absolutely free state, in which fiction would be put at the disposal of everyone and would develop without passing through something like a necessary or constraining figure. Foucault, 331