Art and Authority

[Paul Nightingale]

To what extent is the artist 'duty-bound' to make their work accessible?
Beckett's theatre, perhaps more so than his fiction, Rothko's art, Resnais'
films - they all problematise the way in which art is consumed (that is, the
relationship between text and reader). They ask you to consider, for
example, what has been left out, whatever it is that signifies meaning in
the form of bite-sized chunks. The extracts Dave has provided from Arts of
Impoverishment deal with interpretation: the reader is privileged precisely
because they are empowered to know what something means. The function of the
author-as-worker, here, is to provide clues ("Joyce gives us all sort of
keys") that allow the reader to decode the text, thereby (re)constructing
the author-as-source. The latter will render the former, effectively,
invisible. Just a little ironic, then, that Bersani & Dutoit seem (I'll have
to check out the book in detail) to complain of the former's opacity denying
the reader a glimpse of the latter. But "a renunciation of cultural
authority" signifies "impotence" - or does it? Hmmm ...

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://waste.org/pipermail/pynchon-l/attachments/20011216/3d637ba8/attachment.html>