I read a short story once in which the main character was living with a poet. He asked her at one point if his interpretation of one of her poems was correct. She replied that if that was what he thought the poem meant, then that is what it meant for him.
He was annoyed by that answer, but it made me wonder if that is the correct way to interpret any and all works of art. Why is the opinion of the late Roger Ebert more valid about a movie any better than mine? An art fart will be disdainful of Norman Rockwell, but why should his or her opinion be any more valid than the average person’s?
The word ‘validity’ is unclear to me, does that mean “equally true”? “Equally meaningful?”
The thing about art is, it can be informed by a collective understanding and background knowledge, and so what an artist is trying to do, including allusions within the art, or the breaking of conventions, may add some extra layers of appreciation or understanding. I don’t know if that makes it “valid” or not, but it often informs my takes on movies, visual art, and books, and sometimes other media.
On the one hand how you view/interpret/enjoy any work of art is entirely up to you. Same as if you eat a particular food. E.G. I hate black licorice but some people love it. Who’s right? (neither or both)
What Ebert and other critics bring to the table is a lifetime of study and a (somewhat) formalized way of assessing a particular piece of art. How does it fit in historically, production values, solid plot, etc…
It would definitely annoy me. Yes, of course it’s true that the reader/watcher/listener will have their own interpretation, and that said interpretation is entirely valid. But, if I ask the creator, I’m wondering what they were thinking. I want their meaning.
Replies like the above sound like they designed it without any purpose or idea, which does make it feel meaningless, like I just found a pattern on the chaos. Like I was just looking at clouds and seeing something illusory.
I get the motivation, to avoid biasing others’ views or having the artist’s views elevated over others’. But I’ve already read the work, and I would not tell if asked not to.
If I’m asking the author, I’m wanting insight into the creative process, the mind of the creator.
Not to say they don’t have a right to hide all that. But I do find it frustrating.
Well, there’s art like Jackson Pollock’s that is a series of chaotic drips and drops and slings of color on a canvas.
He was probably pretty drunk when he painted them. He was an alcoholic.
So it’s no telling what he meant. I’m sure he was asked, I’m sure he spat some nastiness out or if on a happy drunk recited some pat answer.
Doesn’t make his art less important.
Text, literature, poetry can be the authors lifetime of thought and experiences or something they overheard on line at the bank.
You just can’t tell. If you ask they may have a long-winded response or they might not even realize.
There is somewhere, I’ve seen(maybe the movie Imagine) where John Lennon is explaining to a fan the song was not about the fan himself, might would be about Yoko but it was a McCartney song, anyway.
The viewer(listener, reader) is left to interpret as they wish.
Professional Critics are taking their view and probably experience on how other audience might see it. Numbers of people buying or seeing an art form.
In the end, I always say: you like what you like. Don’t let any one tell you, you should not.
See, I don’t expect that Pollock would say it means whatever you think it means. His art seems to eschew meaning for aesthetics, which is perfectly valid.
It’s specifically the “it means what you think it means” answer that I find annoying. Yeah, of course it does. But what did it mean when you the artist made it? Even if the meaning was vague or non-existent, I would like to know.
Indeed. When asked, he talked about trying to translate the emotions and energy he felt inside onto the canvas. (I’ve posted elsewhere here about how I made fun of Pollock for years, and then I saw one in person and was knocked over. )
Didn’t the poet create the whole poem to express their meaning? They just went to all this effort to put these words together in the best way they could manage, and then someone is like “Nope, not good enough. Use different words to say what you mean.”
I used to be a working artist of sorts. I painted paintings and they hung in galleries. One of my favorite things to do was stand just within earshot of a painting and listen to people interoperate its meaning. I generally had a specific idea in mind when I painted a picture and so I used to rebel against the idea that someone could assign it a different meaning - but I’ve warmed to it. Their interoperation is just as valid as any.
It’s not. I despise professional critics. Someone had a dream. They labored over a script. They begged, borrowed and convinced investors. They hired actors and crews. Worked for possibly the better part of a year and invested millions of dollars only to have it dismissed by a haughty want to be.
I always thought it would be an interesting thought experiment to hack into his bank account and take his life savings and tell him you were going to invest it all in one movie, his choice. Do you think he would choose an arthouse movie, that he loves? Or maybe a Marvel blockbuster that he often despised?
There is a case to be made that his alcoholism fueled his creativity. See here.
I went down that rabbit hole once and distilled it down into this question:
If Earnest Hemmingway had never touched a drop of alcohol, would we know his name today?
That’s really unfair to Roger Ebert, who was pretty famous for being willing to meet movies at their own level - he’d give a horror movie a good rating if it were scary, because that’s the point of a horror movie, even if it didn’t have any sort of deeper meaning or clever symbolism. Case in point, of the six Marvel movies that he reviewed before his death, he only gave a negative review to Thor, which is widely regarded even among fans as the weakest of the Phase I Marvel movies.
And literally any critic would choose to fund the blockbuster over the arthouse film in your hypothetical. Even the snootiest critic still likes money, and they all understand the difference between “popular” and “good.” Bankrolling a superhero flick while personally preferring impenetrable art films isn’t some sort of moral hypocrisy.
I tend to take things at face value, rarely if ever looking for deeper meanings. But I do like when someone points out this thing in the background of the painting or that bit of dialogue and suddenly I’m seeing more than I did at first.
On the other hand, those who treat their opinion as the ultimate interpretation tend to irritate me. I think back to my 12th grade English teacher who asked on a test “What is the saddest line in this story?” If your choice didn’t match hers, you were wrong - yeah, I was wrong. When she explained her choice, I did see why she thought that, but I still felt like the question was for an opinion, not a fact. It’s more than 50 years later and it still irritates me!!
There’s deep interpretation of, say, an abstract painting or a sculpture, which is what most of you ar writing about. But there’s also a lower level of simply understanding some basic things about the work of art.
George Christoph Lichtenberg wrote detailed descriptions interpreting the paintings and engravings of British artist William Hogarth. You can argue about whether he has correctly interpreted exactly what Hogarth meant to say or imply, but there’s little doubt that he was correct in interpreting what was going on in the scenes Hogarth depicted. That includes, to some degree, what Hogarth meant to imply that might not be immediately obvious, but is what virtually all informed critics take the scene to mean.
As a rough analogy, it’s generally pretty clear what Normal Rockwell meant in the scenes from Boy Scout life he depicted, but there’s not much deeper meaning there, and most modern viewers aren’t in much doubt about what’s going on (The Scout is having his Eagle Scout medal pinned on. He ;looks determined. His parents standing nearby are prod), so no modern Lichtenberg is writing detailed descriptions of them. But in the case of Hogarth, not only are we separated in time and custom, but there is lot more going on under the surface. At this level of uncontested interpretation, the critic helps understanding.
Of course, you can make controversial claims about Norman Rockwell, too. To me , as, I think, to many observers, The Connoisseur is a straightforward commentary on Jackson Pollock and other "action painters.
One modern critic, unsatisfied with this drab and obvious interpretation, suggests that the white blotch just behind the gray-suited man is meant to represent ejaculate.
