Should Orson Scott Card be Allowed to Write Superman?

Status
Not open for further replies.
fade

fade

Staff member
Bowielee said:
There's a great deal of debate about how much the intent of the author is to be considered when deconstructing a piece. Personally, I'm of the mind that once an author releases a piece into "the wild", their interpretation no longer means anything. Sure, it's insightful to learn what the author's original intent is, but the entire point of any art piece is to provoke a reaction and to open itself up to interpretation by its audience.
Click to expand...
I placed fallacy in quotes because I think it's best not to call it one. It's one of those things that shouldn't drive your interpretation, but I don't believe it's fallacious to consider it.

A little off-topic, but there's actually an extremely lovely episode of Northern Exposure that deals with taking deconstruction too far. I must've watched it like 5 times because it is beautiful. Chris is defending his Master's thesis, which is a deconstruction of Casey at the Bat. His committee is made up of a young deconstructionist and a surly older professor who finds Chris's deconstruction terrible on the basis that he feels it rips the intended heart out of the poem.
It ends with Chris agreeing that there is no beauty lost in interpreting the poem as a literal ode to baseball.
Still think that was the best show ever to air on television.
 
Necronic

Necronic

Staff member
The artwork itself stands alone in its aesthetic nature, that's simply how art works. When i read a book or look at a painting I am not examining the bio of the artist. I'm simply looking at the art. In this age of the Internet and wikipedia it's sometimes hard to seperate the art and the artist because we all want a more complete vision of the creator and the creation, but unless it's a story like Adaptation....it's not really relevant.

Now, that said, financially supporting an artist that will use that income to do somethig that bothers you...that's much different. But honestly, how can you even avoid it? Every motion picture you watch has at least one person working on it that has views that you find morally abhorrent. So no matter what you do your supporting your enemies. In some cases, like this one, the support is a little more direct. I guess it's a personal choice for the buyer. I read Enders Game before I knew what Card was, and I love the books. Even after finding out I feel that the good philosophies that he supports in those books are more profound than the damage his organization does. It doesn't hurt that Harrison Ford is going to be playing colonel Graff in the upcoming film.
 
Necronic

Necronic

Staff member
Or the subject of seperatif art and artist (not considering the financial side I mentioned earlier), let me make another point.

Let's step away from art for a second and look at science instead. Do we care what kind of person the scientist is when we look at his science? Of course not. If we did then who knows where our space program would be today (without the nazi scientists we grabbed.). With science it's easier to come to this conclusion because everyone agrees that science is objective. Art, however, is much more subjective. But if we're even going to discuss whether an art "has merit" or "is good" then there is a measure of objectivity in the valuation of the art. And that objectivity should preclude us from considering irrelevant factors.


Oh yeah, and as for a list of people who you couldn't read if you couldn't separate the art and artist? It's a bit worse than you thought:

Wagner
TS Elliot
Degas
Ezra Pound
Picasso
Hemingway
Dickens

All of them have stuff in their lives that make them look like absolute pieces of shit:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/22/o...-good-art-bad-people.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
 
Necronic

Necronic

Staff member
The problem is that their tragedy wasn't a victimless crime. Many of these authors and poets made their family lives a living hell, a form of living sacrifice that sanctifies the work in some twisted blood ritual.
 
Bowielee

Bowielee

fade said:
I placed fallacy in quotes because I think it's best not to call it one. It's one of those things that shouldn't drive your interpretation, but I don't believe it's fallacious to consider it.

A little off-topic, but there's actually an extremely lovely episode of Northern Exposure that deals with taking deconstruction too far. I must've watched it like 5 times because it is beautiful. Chris is defending his Master's thesis, which is a deconstruction of Casey at the Bat. His committee is made up of a young deconstructionist and a surly older professor who finds Chris's deconstruction terrible on the basis that he feels it rips the intended heart out of the poem.
It ends with Chris agreeing that there is no beauty lost in interpreting the poem as a literal ode to baseball.
Still think that was the best show ever to air on television.
Click to expand...
Northern Exposure is in my top ten best TV shows of all time.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Top