And these reason I bring up the movie at all is because it frames the question in a plausible way, I know scholars argue over the intentions of crazy artists like Henry Darger, about the supposed gender/queer implications of his fantasy girls have dicks etc. and I'm sure they argue about other crazy artists

Look up authorial intent and the post-structuralists I cba to type

>>7226903
Thinly disguised homework thread.

On the off chance you actually care about the subject matter, all you're going to find here is a lot of goalpost-shifting between art having value as a medium of expression and art having value only to the audience.

Oh, and read the essay "The Death of the Author" by Roland Barthes.

>>7226926
>homework
I wish, I graduate high school a long time ago and I'm too poor for college. I just saw a movie that asked a question and I thought /lit/ could answer it

Uh, hey, everybody! I'm a stupid moron with an ugly face and a big butt and my butt smells and I like to kiss my own butt.

>>7226930
Probably a bad idea because that essay destroyed literary criticism and art as a whole

>>7226903
>Does the artist's intention matter?
it depends is he writing something to convince you or is it something else? we call it in dutch( a betoog)

>>7226954
We cant know that!

You're asking the wrong questions. The artist's intention concerns the artist alone. We face another problem that whatever the artist intentions were, we can only access what he does and say. So if he does some work, I don't know what he intended, I do know what he said. I'll talk then about what he said. Of course, I read that message in a certain way, I have my own way of looking at it and it will show if I talk about it to you, nevertheless, I'd have no pretention to guess that the artist must have intended for his piece to show itself in the particular way in which I'm reading it just because I'm reading it in that particular way. And if you ought to talk to me about it and show a different perspective, I shall consider it and dialogue with it, it will change my perception in some way, sometimes radically, sometimes an almost invisible change. In the same way, were the artist talk to me about what he meant to do, what he intended with his piece and not, I'd consider it insofar as it would show me a different aspect of his work that I might have missed. Both cases, are, however my own readings of very different texts, that is, the texts of their speeches, both the artist and the spectator. That is because when the piece is done and shown, we are all spectators of it, including the artist, who faces what he has done, whether he is satisfied with it or not considering his intentions. Meanwhile, I'll look at it for the first time and see what I see as if it was all there is to see, with or without talking to other people or the artist, because I'll be at that point in space and time and life, with the knowledge that I have and don't have on it and the emotional experience to relate to it in a certain way. The artist who understands this as a threat to his message and to his intentions has a problem with his own production, this artist doesn't know how to deal with the relationship between what he intends and what he does (a matter everyone face). Our intentions may strike us as an internal force that drives our actions, but after something is done, it is what it is. That's why we so often hear that the art piece is the artist's child, in the same way that a parent produces a child but that child has a life of its own and it will meet different people and change itself at every encounter. After the child is born, after the piece is done, it is not the artist's anymore as his intentions were before, only his and no one else's.

>>7227387
/lit is really full of drama queens. That essay didn't even destroy Barthes himself as an artist.

You're the kind of faggot to say "art is dead" because whatever painting you see on buzzfeed links doesn't look like Raphaël's Galatea, aren't you ?