this post was submitted on 27 Oct 2023
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Sometimes the curtains are blue because the artist likes blue.
Sometimes the curtains are blue because the artist's childhood bedroom had blue curtains and they subconsciously remind the artist of some aspect of their youth, but they've no idea that's why they wanted to draw blue curtains as they were replaced with blinds when they were pretty young, and they've forgotten about having had blue curtains, so if asked, would say they just liked blue.
And sometimes the curtains are blue because the artist wanted a blue background for space curtains, but didn't have enough time to add the stars, planets, spaceships and aliens.
For instance, in the first example the artist added a skull because it looked rad. But why did it look rad? What influences did the artist have that made skulls rad to them and not scary or beautiful or holy?
Also it doesn't really matter what the author thinks as long as you can support an interpretation with some evidence. Richard Adams, for example, stated that Watership Down has no meaning and was just some bunny stories for his kids.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Death_of_the_Author?useskin=vector
So he just wanted to traumatize his kids - for fun!
...but I think that's a good point. Once the work is out of the artists hands it lives a life of it's own. It's a pet peeve of mine when people start bickering and bitching "well no the song/book/movie means this and not that, dumbass, we have the artist on record saying so" like it means anything. I mean sure, it means something, but in the context of personal interpretation it's pretty much meaningless unless it matters to the interpreter. There are so many layers to it and interpretations and how we experience any kind of works is subjective.
I got in this fight with a friend who had a painting created by another friend. It was skull, lighter, knife.
He asked me what it meant, and I don't remember what I said... But he jumped up with this victorious expression and went "No! It means nothing, it's just skull, lighter, knife. Other friend painted it,, and". I got into some death of the artist philosophy and he started to get pissed the more I insisted it doesn't matter what the artist though, it's what you get out of it. The artist had a snug smile behind the other guy
I got terrible grades in the essay portion of every AP lit test because my takes were different than the consensus. I just remember one of them where I tried to defend my take... But what I took out meant nothing to the author, but he insisted the critics were definitely way off
Here's the thing - no one does anything for one reason, or even zero reasons. Artists usually don't have a hidden message beyond the story structure - all creation is a reflection of the creator. There's no arbitrary or random - humans aren't capable of that.
It's like looking at someone's bedroom... There's no version of a bedroom that says nothing about the occupant