The Death of the ‘Authorlessness Theory’? Essay

Orchids & Art, a quaint store tucked away behind Arena Liquor off Corporate Lake Drive in Columbia, Missouri, was brimming with wooden picture frames of various sizes waiting to be picked like ripe apples hanging from an apple tree. Navigating through the back of the store was like trekking through a maze. Glazed frames lay in the walkway, while others were plastered across the wall. An ethereal garden of beautiful orchids sat in a small corner towards the front of the store. Orange and white petals blossomed from pots of assorted shapes and sizes. It added a feminine touch to the masculine wooden frames. Kelly Coalier’s cartoon-like paintings, including one of George Washington with purple guns above his head, sat for

If the image is no longer unique and exclusive, the art object, the thing, must be made mysteriously so,” (Berger 44). Therefore, the final step in the exploitation of power is mystification of its origins. Over time a concept will build its image and solidify its strength through results, showing the public its value until it becomes integrated and thus, hidden within society. There are several examples of power that has become formally accepted or internalized by the public and it is difficult to see how they exploit power because their origins are mystified. For the concept of originality in art, we can see how its status may have risen because of the definition we give to “originality” rules that have commercial purposes or vice versa. Some examples include companies that have copyright issues to protect names and identities that belong to them, or schools that incorporate rules about plagiarism. The idea of originality has already become internalized within our society that assigning a market meaning with it, just seems natural. If our judicial system has already incorporated ideas of “originality”, then not many people will see any problems with it. However, it is important to look at the origins and realize how a power came to be to prevent it from being exploited. Another covert concept integrated within society

Literature has been a part of our cultural inheritance that enriches our lives from centuries. Every literary work carries such great historical, social, intellectual importance and deepens our understanding of our society as well as our history. History plays a basic role in shaping any kind of literary works: every play, poem, novel we read is either affected by the people surrounding the author, the political context in which it was written or the society that shapes the entire work. As Roland Barthes argues that the author “can only imitate a gesture that is always anterior, never original” meaning that he is always the product of his time and that he always writes what she or he learned from that particular time in history.

Judy Chicago's Dinner Party, which opened at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in March 1979, is a synthesis of the decorative and fine arts; it is theater,

Carrie Mae Weems is an American artist who was known for creating works to reveal contemporary African-American life and her own experience as a woman. For gender and family issues, Kitchen Table Series, which was created in 1990, is one of Weems’s most famous photographic works. In the series, Weems made herself became both the photographer and the performer, and all of the images were centered in the same domestic scene – kitchen table. Looks like an everyday snapshot, Weems shows the different traditional roles she played in her life and the intimate relationships that she has with other people: men and women, mother and children, and women and their girlfriends.

I went to the Crocker art museum in california. I chose this museum because my cousin had recommended it to me I had also figured since I was out of chicago I would see lots of local paintings and exhibits that I would never see in chicago. my experience there was very pleasant, the museum was extremely large and had many different aries to explore.

The Dinner Party is one of the feminist artwork exhibited in the gallery, celebrating forgotten achievements in the female history. Chicago’s use of subject matter explores the feminist principle inequality; such as the elaborated and organized arrangement in which this artwork was developed. She describes it as, “a reinterpretation of The Last Supper from the point of view of women, who throughout history, have prepared the meals and set the table.” This portrayal of woman is used throughout the history of American Revolution. Also featuring different eras; like the classical Rome and the reformation of Christianity. Chicago’s piece is an icon of feminist art which represents 1,038 women in history and another 999 names are inscribed in the Heritage Floor in which the table rests. The multi-media work comprises of pottery, china painting, sewing, embroidery, weaving and other mediums that is customarily connected with ‘women’s work’, and as such, not generally considered “high-art” by the art world. Chicago’s aims was to commemorate traditional female accomplishments which have historically been framed as craft or domestic art. Some of the materials used in this work highlights the bold, sensual imagery suggestive of flowers, female genitalia, and butterflies, about which the artist once explained, “My images are about struggling out of containment, reaching out and opening up as opposed to masking or veiling.” This emphasizes that although Chicago is the theorist behind of

Although these magazines present a new visualization of craft and women, by putting forward the same theoretical ideas found in women’s magazines of the early 20th century, than pretty no longer makes the cut for what qualifies as significant for craft in the 21st

I can only hope that the women that have looked at this portrait of me are inspired to pursue their goals and dreams, no matter how foolish they may seem to be by society. I have been fortunate enough to be allowed to break away from my expected norms and go after the arts. I hear that I am the “first known woman artists to achieve international fame,” (Clara, 2012) which means that my efforts and my talents have not gone in vain. It is my humble wish that decades from now, women can look at this painting and see that their efforts to be more equal to men are worth and so important.

Judy’s Art work was very inspirational. Her work follows multiple traditional roles of an artist. It gives you a visual feeling instantaneously. Art isn’t art unless it makes you uncomfortable. Art gives you that extraordinary feeling, and Judy Chicago’s work unquestionably has that. When I first laid eyes on the art work, I automatically thought “oh vagina”, and surprisingly I was correct. It didn’t make me uncomfortable but in fact made me think and wonder why are there a bunch of vaginas. The clarification on her art work made it remarkable, it is a piece of work. I will definitely always remember it because it represents women’s rights, which will always matter. For her to represent women who aren’t even noticed is impressive and it would make me feel good about myself to get some acknowledgment. Judy’s art work reveals a hidden truth, and it helped me feel appreciative for women’s rights because I often don’t think of them because I am a male. So, the feelings of the women who are actually featured in the piece of work is mindboggling.

When writing about a work of art, one’s opinion can influence the way in which another perceives the work of art they are viewing. When multiple individuals analyze the same work of art, their opinions pertaining to the work of art can vary greatly. For instance, when observing O’ Keefe’s artwork, multifarious opinions and ideas come to the minds of those analyzing the work of art. There is a common belief that her artwork symbolizes femininity, considering the way in which she utilizes flowers and the implied relationship that some are capable of associating with a female body structure. However, when one expresses their ideas of a work of art they can potentially influence or contradict the beliefs contained by other individuals viewing the

In order to achieve a deeper understanding of what this quote really means, an analysis of the context of the quote must be established. This quote coincides with Barthes’ philosophy during his transition from structuralism to post-structuralism. In 1968, Barthes wrote an impactful essay, Death of the Author. In this essay, he explored a radically different viewpoint of authorship than what was popular at the time. According to his viewpoint, a work of literature was not finished when published by its’ author, he wouldn’t even consider it a complete work. According to him, “to give a text an author is to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing” (Barthes 5). Barthes did

W. K. Wimsatt, Jr. and M. C. Beardsley co-authored “The Intentional Fallacy” in response to the debate among literary scholars in the 1940s concerning the issue of authorial intent as a measure of judgment upon a literary work of art. Wimsatt and Beardsley (468-469) champion the idea of anti-intentionalism in opposition to noted scholars and critics of the day, arguing that the success and meaning of a literary work must not be judged by the author’s intent, if it is even available, but rather solely by the work itself. Because the reader cannot possibly know an author’s intent at the moment the work was conceived, the authors suggest that if a poem is successful, its success is measured within its own structure, content, and language. It succeeds

Sarah Lucas is an English sculptor, installation artist and photographer who gained fame as one of the major Young British Artists during the 1990s, with a series of highly provocative work. Lucas began in the early 1990s by using furniture as a representation of the human body, usually with crude genital connotations, adopting the methods of Pop Art, Conceptualism and Minimalism, amongst others. In the piece entitled ‘Bitch, 1995’ she uses a table, t-shirt, melons and vacuum-packed smoked fish to combine misogynist tabloid culture with the economy of the ready-made. (See Fig 18) Lucas cleverly confronts sexual stereotyping, using a basic artistic language that has an affinity with the detrimental portrayal of sexuality itself. Her use of vernacular language, Surrealism and the material sparseness of Arte Povera, substitutes furniture and food for the human body, revealing the degrading attitudes to women. “As an artist marshalling everyday domestic life, Lucas in the 1990s seized Duchamp’s pioneering idea of found objects to make a significant if unlovely contribution to the repositioning of the female body in late 20th-century sculpture.” (Wullschlager, 2013) Titles such as ‘Two Fried Eggs and a Kebab’ are a perversion of the slang denomination of a woman, and the artwork is a parody of the traditional still life, that evokes Judy Chicago’s ‘Dinner Party’ (See Fig 16). Lucas employs bourgeois materials and methods to attract and engage the philistine in us all, evoking a

The ancient authors are usually seen as the ultimate reference for knowledge and art, which explains why the ancient conception of art is based on mimesis. The term has “two primary senses: […] a representation of some ideal object (Plato) and […] something that is made by some causal process (Aristotle). In either case, art was conceived as a form of mimesis.” (Townsend 208) Mimesis and authority share a structural duality related to time. Indeed, causality and imitation presuppose a linearity that in fact is a hierarchy. In literary criticism, authority is usually defined as: