Today was very interesting lesson. Abigail Christenson made her presentation about…public art(?) – importance of community together with artist produce art(?) –or “nothing are original in this world…and everything were already done and told”…I am not sure. But anyway it was so far the best presentation and amazing subject.
Abigail has told about book “Death of the Author” by Roland Barthes.
Brain storm!
“The reader is the space on which all the quotations that make up a writing are inscribed without any of them being lost; a text’s unity lies not in its origin but in its destination. Yet this destination cannot any longer be personal: the reader is without history, biography, psychology; he is simply that someone who holds together in a single field all the traces by which the written text is constituted.”
--Roland Barthes (“The Death of the Author”)
--Roland Barthes (“The Death of the Author”)
My understanding about sophisticated meaning and wise, difficult language of the book are – (if in simple words and briefly) -
- If there are no readers and nobody want to read books – those books are useless.
If there are no public comments about the art and no one wants to see that art – that art is useless.
The Preface to ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’ by Oscar Wilde:
The critic is he who can translate into another manner or a new material his impression of beautiful things.
The highest as the lowest form of criticism is a mode of autobiography. Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming.
This is a fault.
Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope.
They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only beauty.
There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written.
That is all.
The nineteenth century dislike of realism is the rage of Caliban seeing his own face in a glass.
The nineteenth century dislike of romanticism is the rage of Caliban not seeing his own face in a glass.
The moral life of man forms part of the subject-matter of the artist, but the morality of art consists in the perfect use of an imperfect medium. No artist desires to prove anything. Even things that are true can be proved.
No artist has ethical sympathies.
An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style. No artist is ever morbid. The artist can express everything.
Thought and language are to the artist instruments of an art.
Vice and virtue are to the artist materials for an art.
From the point of view of form, the type of all the arts is the art of the musician.
From the point of view of feeling, the actor's craft is the type.
All art is at once surface and symbol.
Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril.
Those who read the symbol do so at their peril.
It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors.
Diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the work is new, complex, and vital.
When critics disagree, the artist is in accord with himself.
We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely.
All art is quite useless.” (The Preface to ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’ by Oscar Wilde)
Everything were told and made already before?
Probably…
