Author, Reader, or Text? (aka Canonicity Slapdown 2005)

[davem]

An author without a reader is as meaningless as a reader without an author.

May not an artist create a work of art for himself alone, write a story, paint a picture, compose a tune, for the moment, & even not go back to it, read what he has written, or look at his painting, or hum the tune? He obeys his muse & then moves on.

It is surely possible. He needs to create the thing, but may not need to do anything with it, or have anyone else do anything with it. Another may later stumble across it, without the creator intending they should do so. In that case, the effect on the reader/viewer would have played no part in the creator's intention. The art is a product of the moment & the mood the artist found himself in. He may have been driven to create his art with no thought of what he (or anyone else for that matter) would 'do' with it.

I'm reminded of Niggle here. In his case it seems that he had no thought of anyone ever seeing his Tree - & in Niggle's 'Primary world' no-one ever did - unless we count the fragment that survived. Some may have seen it 'in Eternity' - yet we don't know whether Niggle's Tree was Niggle's own painting brought to life, or whether it had always been 'there' & Niggle merely set down his own 'vision' of it in paint on canvas. In that story it is the act of creation of the art that is important, & the fact that no-one ever saw it, let alone appreciated it, was irrelevant - and most of all it was irrelevant to Niggle himself.

If this is the case - & it may well be - then the art stands, even if no-one ever experiences it, because it it the act of creation by the artist that is the only point....