More On Wrong Answers In Art And Related Matters

 Me:

I try to get out and they pull me back in: :-)

 …art is a subjective communication between the artist, the artwork and the observer…

I guess everything is a subjective communication when communication occurs. It’s among, in your terms, the communicator, the communicatee and the content of the communication.

But isn’t it more than that? The content if coherent has discrete meaning. The meaning may in its coherence be purposefully ambiguous or clear. What you say to me, in or out of school, isn’t just reducible to how I take it, my subjectivity in relation to what you say. I may in all my subjectivity simply mistake what you’re saying. 

It’s similar when the triad is literary artist, his work and the reader. The work isn’t reducible, in or out of school, to what the reader thinks of it. The reader, in and out of school, can be wrong, Who’s to say? Objective reality is to say. A proficient consensus in the art can say even as that consensus a little like the scientific understanding of something may be provisional, as new insights come along. Still, for all that provisionality in literary criticism, what’s wrong in the reading of a text is indeed falsifiable by the evidence of the text. The crude example I originally gave of Lear as kind of fatalistic comedy as in, “O well, shit happens. Let’s move on.” is objectively wrong. Anyone who thinks that of Lear is wrong. In school or out.

I say this particularly in relation to literature because it’s made up of words. There are different things to be said about the other arts.

If you disagree with all this, then that’s where we substantively disagree.

And Me:

You can restrict yourself to this threesome. But why do that when the issue, subjectivity’s trump outside of school grading, reaches beyond that triad, as I’ve argued?

In theory, and I stress in theory, the author’s intention is just another opinion about his work. Once it’s released, his creation has an autonomous existence and belongs to the world. Another may understand the work better than its creator, see elements and relations among the parts, see more deeply into the characters and their conflicts, see the poetry of the language, the imagery, symbolism, and mythic patterns and resonances and so on, better than the author. As a practical matter what the author says he intended of course counts, but it’s not determinative. 

A friend once sent me a poem he’d written and I made a point about it that arose concretely from the poem, ie, it wasn’t fanciful, and he said that that simply hadn’t occurred to him.

A nice analogy here is the legal theory of originalism. In its early modern conception, it held that constitutional and statutory language had to be understood in light of what the drafters intended. Most of this involved getting into dead peoples’ heads. The potent refinement involved replacing that surmising exercise with the communicative content or the language in question, the exploration of which has roots deep in historical usage and linguistic analysis. There’s a lot more to be said about originalism but for the point I’m making about literary works and authorial intention, this will suffice.

In the innovation in academic literary criticism in mid twentieth century called the New Criticism, which was the critical doctrine I studied literature under, the argument at its extreme was precisely that you don’t need historical context to get the work. In its autonomous existence, you need to attend to its aesthetic properties to get it, needing scholarship only to explain language and historical archaisms where necessary, like the explanatory footnotes in an edition of a Shakespeare play. There’s a lot to this idea but taken too far it becomes reductive because it crowds out contexts that facilitate and enrich understanding. But it’s my position that they’re usually secondary, however helpful, to the analysis of the work by means of its own aesthetic properties. I’ll agree that exceptions exist. Guernica may well be one. I don’t think For Whom the Bell Tolls is. Portraits that are now part of the visual art canon aren’t either, I’d argue.

So, I’m of two minds about your saying without context we can’t fully access the work and what the artist was trying to communicate. Appreciating the Mona Lisa is helped I agree by knowing the circumstances of its creation and how da Vinci’s life may form part of those circumstances. But, on my view of intention, all  those circumstances bow to looking hard and knowingly at the work and thereby seeing what’s in it and how and what it projects. So while history and biography help, the truly indispensable context is the larger aesthetic tradition, its principles and techniques, within which da Vinci worked.

T.S. Eliot in his famous seminal essay Tradition and the Individual Talent argues for and explores the tradition in which the literary artist works and the reciprocal relation between it and his individual work both, if you will, dialectically affecting each other and finding synthesis in what the new work brings to the tradition. Harold Bloom overdoes and romanticizes this point in his argument that great literary artists create under an anxiety of influence.

So I disagree that one can’t understand the examples you cite without knowing the history that gives them particular moment. If great art is universal, as I think it is, then one without the historical understanding of your examples, may understand the works better than someone who has it but has a lesser aesthetic appreciation of what’s comprising the work. And one without the historical understanding and without the refined critical eye may yet still feel the emotional power of the works more fully than the former two. Ideally, that’s how artistic criticism of a kind ought go, the engaged experience compelling the individual and then the individual, if he wants to, thinking about and analyzing the work to get at its meaning and its means.

So all this said, I’ll just restate my point, a work will be best understood by the best understanding and apprehension of its content, in or out of school. School translates engaging art into a discipline. And in or out of school, a work’s content demands to be respected, demands to be adhered to, and in its particularity, ie, its parts adding up to its coherent fullness, it provides the ground for judging what is right and what is wrong in the engaged’s articulation of his subjective response.

On Wrong Answers In Art

S:

I’m trying to make a much simpler point.  It’s a test of knowledge.  The student is entitled to his own subjective opinion but not to his own subjective ‘knowledge’ if his interpretation of the key thereof Lear say is different from the curriculum being tested (and surely the key theme of Lear would be on the course curriculum) he fails the question whatever his interpretation.  That’s different than art.

So maybe I’m hung up on the particular exam example.  

The saying went about the notoriously difficult CFA examination, that there’s a right answer, there’s a wrong answer, and there’s the CFA Institute answer.  Even if you thought you had the right answer, you only got credit for the CFA Institute answer

Me:

Not clear on your simpler point.

In the domains I know best, law and literature, what counts as knowledge and what’s being “tested” qua grading—for literature probably starting in the senior high school grades and then up—is not so much knowledge in the sense of answering fact based questions. What’s wanted is the ability to interpret the taught texts, ie, interpretive ability. 

Now you could argue that since in the study of cases or works you’re taught what the cases stand for and what works may mean so that all that then becomes knowledge. So on exams to be able to give that information/knowledge back in a workmanlike way will get you a workmanlike grade. 

There’s something to that.

But in neither discipline is it quite that straightforward. 

In law school exams, you’re typically given fact situations that you analyze with what the cases says. You show your ability pretty quickly to apply the cases. Competent students will spot the issues that then provide them with a means of showing they understand the cases. A better student’s analysis will be sharper, subtler and more incisive. A superior student might have fresh insights or will be able to put the principles together in very creative ways.

Literature exams I are more on point to the point I’m trying to argue, which is that in art, interpretation can be distinguished from factual knowledge and can be erroneous.

Typically, English exams ask students to discuss work(s) given a certain general proposition or to compare works from a certain point of view. Classroom discussion will hopefully help students understand the works well enough to meet the challenge of discussing them from new perspectives on the spot. 

When English students are graded on essays, they will have to—among other things—at a minimum offer a supported view of work(s) coming with a plausible range of what they might mean. It’s entirely possible and not uncommon that As might be given to opposing interpretations of a work. 

To make a long story shorter, in both disciplines students will do poorly or fail if what they say about the material, the cases or the literary works, is so off base, so insupportable, that it’s WRONG—with emphasis on wrong—and not only wrong but I argue objectively wrong. 

So I don’t think schools testing and grading about taught works is different from apprehending art. This testing and grading in is, in my opinion, a more rigorous, focussed example of what people do when they informally discuss art.

 For behind those discussions is texts’ demand that they be respected by being adhered to and, so, not distorted. In such discussions typically no arbiters, expert in the work, tell the discussants the way it is. To be clear, the way it is can accommodate a wide variety of views, but in principle will oust views that are plain wrong.

If English professors are worth their salt, there will be no one right answer as to the meaning of a work, but there can be plenty of wrong answers.