The artist’s actual theme, that he has created.
Here’s Rand’s statement rewritten to reflect what I take to be your opinion of what she meant:
“In essence, an objective evaluation requires that one identify the [artwork’s] theme, the abstract meaning of the work (exclusively by identifying the evidence contained in the work and allowing no other, outside considerations), then evaluate the means by which [the art] conveys it—i.e., taking [its] theme as criterion, evaluate the purely esthetic elements of the work, the technical mastery (or lack of it) with which [it] projects (or fails to project) [its] view of life…”
I don’t think it represents Rand’s view. As you say, she recognized that some subconscious content can influence a work of art, but she also had an expectation of communication – as I said earlier, to communicate is to convey information so that it is understood as intended (and I think that she had other purposes for her comments on subconscious content in art, but I suspect that I probably wouldn’t be allowed to discuss them freely here). You’re right that she distinguished between meaning and intention, just as she distinguished between subject and theme, but she also expected art to be an integration of meaning, style and intention, just as she expected it to be an integration of subject and theme.
Part of her reasoning for rejecting abstract art was that she felt that its practitioners believed that what they were presenting could not be communicated (which is not true of all abstract artists; for example, Kandinsky, the father of abstract art, was very concerned with communication, and he felt that his theories were the first step toward establishing a universal conceptual vocabulary of visual abstraction, very much like what Rand expected would one day be discovered for music). In rejecting abstract art, Rand said that “all art is communication,” and she clearly had the expectation that an artist would want his work to be a means of communicating with others, and that if he didn’t, his work ceased to be art, and that he was even trying to destroy the very concept of art.
I assume you think this is problematic because two people can differ on what that theme is.
Yes and no. My reasoning is multifaceted, and more complex than that.
I think the issue of expecting to objectively identify an “actual theme” is problematic because two people can differ on what the theme is, and the evidence can support both of their views, as well as multiple other views.
I’ve seen it countless times. One viewer will say that the meaning of a painting of a fat, nude woman is that mankind is ugly, gluttonous, and lacking in self-control and self-respect; another viewer will say that the meaning is that beauty comes in different shapes and sizes, and that the painting is a confident, unconventional approach to beauty, and is very individualistic and even a bit rebellious; yet another viewer will say that the meaning is that the woman’s bulk implies solid substance, abundance/economic success, and fertility, and that those things are more important than the vanity of surface beauty. Each viewer will be able to point to objective reality to support his interpretation. Nothing in the painting will allow for an objective refutation of any of the interpretations.
But there’s also a larger problem, which is that Rand’s proposed method of judgment asks the viewer to identify meaning as well as to evaluate how well the meaning was conveyed, which is like trying to test a transmitter and receiver by listening to a message that was sent between the two, but without being able to verify by outside means what was actually transmitted. If the receiver receives the transmission “beep, beep crackle, beep, pop,” then that’s the “actual transmission,” and no negative evaluation is possible because the actual transmission was received and identified. Without verification by means outside of the transmitter and receiver, there’s no way to establish whether or not both machines are functioning properly.
Similarly, once one claims to have identified the “actual meaning” of a work of art, there are no objective grounds on which to claim that the art is aesthetically bad. If a viewer thinks that he has discovered an aspect of an artwork that is poorly executed or in conflict with what he has determined to be the meaning, then it could be legitimately argued that he hasn’t really discovered an error or poor quality, but that he has only discovered that he has erred in identifying the meaning, and that he needs to reconsider the evidence without presuming that the it must support his original faulty interpretation. Any, and every, negative appraisal could simply be an indication that the “actual meaning” hasn’t yet been discovered by the person doing the judging.
In an earlier post I gave the example of trying to identify a woman’s task by watching her buying items in a store, and then trying to evaluate how well the task was accomplished. In the scenario, we don’t know that she went to the store with the purpose of sticking to a healthy diet and buying ingredients for a salad, but then quickly gave in to her craving for sweets and decided to bake and devour a large batch of her favorite high-calorie cookies, for which she realized that she needed to pick up some nutmeg and sugar. Without knowledge of her intentions, judging how well she performed her task is meaningless – she did what we saw her do, therefore she appears to have accomplished her task rather than having abandoned it, and therefore only a positive appraisal is possible.
The same is true of trying to identify meaning in a painting and to then evaluate the technical mastery with which an artist projected it, without reference to outside verification.
Another facet is the problem of the viewer’s qualifications to judge art. To use the transmitter/receiver analogy again, communication involves someone or something acting as a transmitter, and someone acting as a receiver. Evaluating the receiver’s ability to receive is just as relevant as evaluating the transmitter’s ability to transmit. When someone claims that a painting has no meaning, it might be nothing more than evidence of his failure to act as a competent receiver.
If a person attempts to read a novel which was written in several alternating languages, including some which he doesn’t understand, the novel would largely be meaningless to him. Would he be making an objective judgment if he claimed that the novel had no “actual meaning”? Or, if he came to an interpretation of its meaning based on the few parts of the novel which were written in the language that he understands, would his interpretation be considered an objective identification of the novel’s “actual theme”? I think the most accurate statement would be that the novel has no meaning to him, or that it has a different meaning to him than it does to others because he has lesser abilities as a “receiver” than they do.
The point of the above analogy is that the non-literary arts very frequently have similar problems, where viewers or listeners don’t “speak the languages,” and more often than not, they appear not to know that they don’t speak them. How would a person determine whether a painting has no meaning or, instead, that he is rather inept at finding meaning through visual means of expression, especially when most people are very strongly emotionally attached to the belief that they are just as aesthetically sensitive as everyone else, or perhaps more sensitive (it’s rare to find people who think that their tastes and responses to art are not superior to everyone else’s)?
Also, there are other facets of my argument, which deal with Rand’s notion of the importance of communication in art which I think strongly imply a focus on intention, and which are based on comparing her applications of her theories to different art forms, and based on trying to identify which principles and standards represent the actual Objectivist positions when questions of contradictions in definitions and criteria arise due to inconsistent applications of theory, but I get the distinct impression that those are addition issues that I’m not allowed to freely discuss here, so it seems that a presentation of the full context of my views may not be possible on OO.
However, that is a general problem in knowledge-acquisition. In many other contexts, the existence of such difference of opinion would not deter Rand from saying that there is an objective reality that needs to be identified. Secondly, that difference of opinion could be irrelevant in the context of some particular discussion.
In an earlier post I gave the hypothetical example of a painter who is somewhat lacking in skill, which makes some people interpret his figures as sickly and unhappy, even though the artist intended them to be heroic (let’s say that he and a few others see his characters’ expressions as serious and focused, and they don’t understand how some people could see them otherwise).
If a viewer wasn’t aware of the artist’s intentions, and interpreted the artwork to mean that mankind is doomed to be sickly and unhappy, and the viewer decided that the painting very effectively projected that meaning, and concluded that the art is therefore aesthetically great, that would be an objective aesthetic evaluation according to your criteria, would it not? It would be what you’re calling the “actual theme” of the painting since viewers would have no way of knowing that the figures were supposed to look heroically serious and focused, no?
See, the trouble that I’m having is in accepting the idea that a method of judging can be called “objective” according to Objectivism when it can lead one to conclude that bad art, which failed at conveying its creator’s “view of life,” is great art because it appears to have expertly conveyed the opposite view of life.
J
P.S. Sorry for the length of this post. I didn’t have time to condense it.
