Squarepusher claimed that he makes his beats by splicing 2" tape together, musique concrete-style. I don’t buy it.
Aronofsky when he said his interpretation of “Requiem for a Dream” was “not a drug movie”.
Bullshit. It’s practically a Partnership for a Drug-Free America PSA.
I’m with Expano and lissener: an artist is rarely aware of his own work, and frankly, the art seems to be come worse as the person becomes more self-conscious.
My main first-hand experience is with film directors. I met Alfred Hitchcock, and he’s the quintessence of “don’t trust the artist, trust the tale.” He said things about what he wanted to do in films that were clearly jokes, and he’d say almost anything for a laugh (British style, so over the heads of most Americans.) Like wanted to have Cary Grant in NORTH BY NORTHWEST hide in George Washington’s nostril atop Mt Rushmore and have a sneezing fit. On the technical side, he was honest and loved those discussions, but when it came to discussing meaning or depth, he lied.
John Ford told me that his movies were all “potboilers” (his word) with no deeper meaning.
I also think of the late (alas) Kurt Vonnegut: his best works were early on, before he became self-conscious. Self-conscious art is rarely anything more than superficial, IMHO.
I’ve got to agree with the OP about “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.” There’s no way that song is not about drugs.
Do the Rolling Stones still deny that Mick sang “you make a dead man cum” at the end of their song “You Make a Grown Man Cry”? It’s clearly there, right before the song fades out.
In response to the furor over The Last Temptation of Christ, Scorsese claimed that he never had any intention of offending the Christian community and didn’t anticipate that anybody would be offended. Bollocks. Anybody with a spoonful of brains would have known that a film which shows Jesus Christ in a sex scene, even if it is a dream, would be profoundly offensive to Christians. The scene was obviously intended just to create controversy for its own sake. Scorsese knew exactly what he was doing.
MADTv’s Ms. Swan isn’t necessarily Asian, just a generic immigrant. Borstein gave up on that line when she ported the character with her to Family Guy.
http://news.softpedia.com/news/Paris-Hilton-039-s-Nude-Corpse-on-Display-53401.shtml
I do not believe what the artist (apparently) says about the nature of this sculpture.
That’s no corpse. And it’s not for educational purposes.
-FrL-
I think this article has merit: Allegory - Wikipedia
I think Tolkien and Lewis would have used the term “allegory” solely for what Frye calls “naive allegory”. So The Faerie Queen, Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, and Lewis’s own Pilgrim’s Regress are allegories, and nothing else mentioned in this thread is. They’d prefer other terms for the other stories, “metaphorical” perhaps.
The basic misunderstanding here is that the word “allegory” has become generalized and fuzzy and therefore less useful, which is probably how Lewis and Tolkien would state their objection.
A story in which real people and events are renamed and thinly disguised is a roman à clef, not an allegory. I’d peg Animal Farm as mostly that. If we go with the “continuum of allegory”, it’s there somewhere, like Aesop’s fables (as the wiki article mentions).
But the art critic has more? As much as a psychologist? I don’t think so. Certainly no responsible psychologist would publicly declare what’s going on in the mind of a person he/she had never met.
I see you’ve slipped from “not necessarily” to “rarely”. And it depends on what you say the meaning of “meaning” is. 
What the artist means and what the art means to the observer are two different things, as you say:
On the latter clause, we disagree.
Heh, I was debating mentioning Dylan. In the PBS special on Dylan I recall an interview where, in an odd occurence that is mainly confined to daytime talk shows, both the interviewer and the interviewee looked bad: (I’m paraphrasing):
Interviewer (I forget the name): So, in your song, hard rain, you’re singing about this rain, this nuclear rain…
Bob: No, it’s a hard rain. A hard rain.
The interviewer should know better than to pin down obviously allusional text from a songwriter, and Bob should have been better than to point out the bleedingly obvious text of the song.
When did they ever deny that? Like you say, it’s perfectly clear. Plus, it’s not just something Mick pulled out of his hat; it’s an old blues lyric. If they ever did deny it, they must have been joking.
BTW, the correct title of the song is “Start Me Up.”
If he meant that he hated acting at that moment in time, I can believe it. He spent the first 15 years of his career as the most mesmerizing actor in America and the last 25 as an increasingly bitter, bizarre and incoherent (remember his infamous rants against Jew-run Hollywood?) man trying to avoid playing himself as Don Vito over and over.
If he meant that he had always hated acting, then no, I don’t buy it either.
Did Arthur C Clarke deliberately choose a name for HAL that was one letter transposed from IBM? He claims not…
That’s part of the post-modern beauty of *Blade Runner * - and Scott’s such a damn fine director that he to let viewers decide on their own about Deckard. It almost doesn’t matter what Scott wanted the character to be; the story is modernist/post-modern, and I think Scott was keeping that in the front of his mind at all times.
As far as LOTR is concerned, Tolkein wasn’t writing in the Restoration genre, when allegory was at its most popular (Swift and Pope were its greatest practitioners; Defoe claimed *Robinson Crusoe * was allegory, but later backtracked) but rather in the the tradition of the Old English epic.
Gosh, Skald, I think “It would be helpful if you learned what the word “allegory” means.” is just a tad harsh, especially since two other people had already pointed out what an allegory is. I’m a graduate student in English Literature and I just learned the real meaning of “allegory” this past semester, so I think it’s not unreasonable for most college-educated people who aren’t English majors to be a little confused over this. I mean, the rest of your post was enlightening, civil and downright educational – I was just a bit put off by your opening sentence is all.
Wow. You completely misread almost everything I said. Which either proves it, or disproves it. . . .
I think Lissener doesn’t think that evaluation of a work’s meaning has anything to do with saying what is on the author’s mind. (Or at least, doesn’t have to have anything to do with it.)
-FrL-
I’m unable to parse that.
But to restate (since, judging by the responses, there appears to be an astonishing lack of clarity in my original statement): Just as you or I or anyone has layers of unexamined baggage behind everything we say, so does an artist. Obviously, the degree of unexaminedness varies with each individual, and one could make the case that an artist, by definition, probably leads a better examined life than your average non-artist. Nonetheless, no single human being can always be consciously aware of every single complex motivation behind every little thing they say and do. Therefore, there is necessarily always an aspect of an artist’s work that he or she is not consciously aware of. Therefore, it is not at all unusual for an artist’s explanation of his work to be incomplete, or–depending on the perversity of the artist (cf. John Ford)–outright incorrect.
Easy with the ‘straigthforward’ there. In the Soviet Union school children were taught that the book was a satire on capitalism and the iniquities of the capitalist system. Now, you might think this interpretation is nonsense, and I might think it’s nonsense, but maybe that’s because we were born and raised within the Western capitalist system, and are therefore less able (than an outsider) to see its deficiencies, or to appreciate when someone such as Orwell is satirising those deficiencies.
Pertinent to the OP, famed literary critic Northrop Frye argued quite persuasively that Ibsen (for example) might be a great dramatist but wouldn’t necessarily be a good critic of Ibsen. In other words, the creator isn’t necessarily in the best position to interpret or analyse the created.
Now there’s a claim that just begs for a cite.
-FrL-
You’re right. I was feeling a bit persnickety when I wrote that, but that doesn’t justify the pointless mockery (I prefer my mockery to be very barbed indeed). I apologize for being a jerk about it.
Oh come on. Nobody could believe that, even if if is true.