Art and Authority

[Dave Monroe]

Bersani and Dutoit are hardly complaining about
anyone's, any work's, opacity.  I'm not so sure
they're valorizing opacity against some sort of
transparency (or perhaps even the putative
translucency they claim for, for example, Joyce), but
... 

But I think what was interesting here was precisely
that claim for such opacity as a renunciation of
authority, for which impotence they further claim a
certain potency.  Thought it might be suggestive here,
is all.  At least it got some reaction, so ... 

But, of course, no author, artist, filmmaker, critic,
whoever, is under any obligation whatsoever to render
his/her/their work intelligible to anyone, just as no
reader, viewer, whoever, is under any obligation to
read, see, sit through or otherwise endure it ...

--- Paul Nightingale <paulngale at supanet.com> wrote:
> 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 ...

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