No, it's not "created as its consumed." Only someone who doesn't understand the process of making art can think that way. This is because the consumer is ignorant of future events the first time they read a book. However, those future events are determined, and can't be altered, regardless of how the consumer feels. It already exists as a certainty. It's more accurate to say that it all exists simultaneously. Past and future events exist simultaneously within the work, informing each other. You have to look at the entire work as a whole to appreciate it. This is because all points of time within the work exist simultaneously, even if you are unaware of it. As an example, go research eternalism.chikusho said:No, art doesn't exist in a vacuum, it's literally being created as it's being consumed. You can research the author, you can research the history and the times and the politics all you want; it will still be a subjective experience based solely and exclusively within the consumer. The only way an authors true intentions can ever be known is if we can somehow record and play back the neurons firing when the work is created - anything and everything outside of that is nothing more than conjecture.Fox12 said:But this where the whole argument comes apart at the seams. Art doesn't exist in a vacuum. You can read Dante's Inferno, and appreciate it by itself. But it's literally impossible to fully appreciate it unless you research the actual author, and the politics of the Catholic Church and Italy. You can't research the text itself, and discount important outside influences. The authors intentions are paramount in this case, because the author himself is both the narrator and the protagonist. They are inseparable. It throws out important aspects of literary criticism for the sake of subjectivity. But this type of subjectivity could never produce the kind of literary scholarships that other methods have.
As for discounting authorial intent, you can't do that when the entire story is built around the author, like in Dante's Inferno. They don't exist as separate entities, and to study the Divine Comedy without studying Dante is an exercise in futility. Your whole argument falls apart around this single example. How do you expect to understand a work of art, if that art is heavily tied to the actual writer? In that case the writer and the art essentially the same. It's essentially an autobiography mixed with a work of high fiction. Even in less extreme examples, many great works of art are a form of expression by the author. The themes are tied to the experiences of the creator. If a piece of art exists as a form of self exploration, how can you separate it from the creator? The lines are far to blurry to claim that the author and work are separate distinct entities. For someone who likes subjectivity, that's a very objective statement to make. Sometimes a work can exist as a separate entity. Sometimes the two are so closely linked that it's essentially impossible.