Intention is a necessary component of art!

Intention is a Necessary Component of Artwork

By Michael Albalah

Note: This was originally an essay I wrote for a class while I was an undergraduate student at Rutgers University. The class was Hnrs: Philosophy of Literature with Peter Kivy. I really enjoyed that class. Professor Kivy was easy person to get to know. He does not hide his feelings. Despite a gruff demeanor, Professor Kivy embodies effortless tenderness by virtue of his love for the well intentioned interpretations of aesthetics. Professor Kivy is a professor of philosophy at Rutgers University. He studies aesthetics and the philosophy of art, particularly the philsophy of music. He earned master's degress in both philosophy (from the University of Michigan aged 24) and musicology (from Yale University aged 26). He earned his PhD at Columbia University at age 32. He joined the faculty at Rutgers the following year, and became full professor in 1976. He taught there for his whole career except one year as a visiting professor at University of California, Santa Barbara. He turned 81 this October.

Good poety elicites satsfaction from the reader. Often this satisfaction is due to the aesthetic appeal of the poem. The meaning of the words of the poem, and decision the author made in choosing and curating those words that contribute to the aesthetic appeal. Some combinations of words have the ability to provide more aesthetic satisfaction then other combinations. A simple example is to consider the words in a dictionary; hypotehtically all words are in a dictionary, but the aesthetic appeal comes from organizing the words in an order other then alphabetical. This demonstrates the relative scale for which aesthetic satisfaction is measured.

In normal conversations the participants share a common goal. The one who makes the utterance and the auditor desired mutual understanding. That is, the participants would like to be on the proverbial, same page (pardon the use of the word proverbial, but a literal page would have to be a very big page). The auditor looks to capture the intent of the message and the author looks to create an utterance that embodies the message in a form understandable by the intended audience. Noel Carrol, in his paper “Art, Intention, and Conversation” believes that both interpreting messages, as one would try to do in conversation, and interpreting and experiencing artwork share certain characteristics. Carol is of the belief that creators of artwork and interpreters of artwork engage in a unique type of conversation. For Carol attempting to understand the meaning of the work of the creator is a noble goal. Other people don't share this analysis. The anti-intentionalist believes that the primary and only goal of artwork, specifically interpreting artwork, is to interpret the piece in a way that is most aesthetically pleasing. That is, the auditor is solely responsible to maximize aesthetic pleasure and should not be biased by the creators meaning. The anti-intentionalist holds the fundamental belief that authorial intent is separate from the actual piece of artwork. One of the reasons this is apparent is because by including authorial intent as a component the set of stimuli being interpreted potentially places a ceiling on the amount of aesthetic pleasure one could attain when interpreting an artwork. If, as the anti-intentionalist does, you separate the artwork for the one meaning the author intended from the actual piece of art, you separate the ability of the authorial intent to eliminate other possible meanings, relevantly, the meaning that provides the most aesthetic pleasure).

According to Carroll, the idea of anti-intentionalism came to fruition during a time when literary critics were fond of attributing biographical qualities of the authors onto their novels. These critics attempted to use the piece of artwork to ascertain an understanding of the biography of the author. Carol feels that this ideology may be accurate in some cases but is flawed as a universal approach to interpreting artwork. There are cases in which the artwork sheds little to no light on the biography of the author; at least in a direct representational sense (by virtue of being a creation of the author it is inherently tied to biographical qualities but not of the sort of which the artwork stands are a vehicle for understanding the biographical nature of the author). Appropriating biographical qualities onto artwork is reductive to the capabilities of creators. Another case that supports the theory that renders authorial intent valueless is the case in which the supposed authorial intent clearly opposes the reality of the artwork. The intentionalist would not hesitate to admit that this is not a good example to support appealing to the intent of the author and would suppose that most likely the author has made a mistake or we have made a mistake in interpreting the supposed intent of meaning given by the author. Even in the less obvious case where it is unclear whether the author meant an allegorical or metaphorical meaning on a certain passage we suppose that we do not understand the author’s actual intent. This seems like the appropriate and intuitively pleasing response as opposed to use this case as motivation to create a universal rule that stipulates that intent of the author is not relevant to interpreting artwork.

Often those attempting to use authorial intent to interpret artwork depend on the actual piece of artwork to reverse engineer the author’s intent. This might be because the author is not around and the intent is unclear. This process poses a problem and helps identify the fundamental belief the anti-intentionalist must hold. This type of interpretation seems to be circular, an epistemic travesty. You can't use the artwork to determine the meaning given by the author as a guide to understanding the meaning of the artwork. You can use either the artwork or the authorial intent to ascertain your interpretation but not depend on your original stimulus as a guide to understand the medium and therefore decipher the meaning of the original stimulus based on your originaly understanding. This would be self fulfilling and illogical.

Excluding the authorial intent from experience of artwork feels wrong. But so does taking the view that the only reasonable experience is the one intended by the author. The former approach is fun but lacks foundation, while the later is reductive and anchoring. Narrowing the plethora of possible interpretations down to the one that the author intended limits the ability of the artwork to affect the auditor but using the intention as a guide to either accept or reject ensures that the relationship we have with art isn't limited to sensory experience. A hypothetical sensory inducing machine can provide whatever aesthetic appeal you might get from art but ultimately all experiences would lose their potency; the value of art is interpersonal relationship that exisits between those creators who skillfully orchestrate our sensory capacities to illicit aesthic approval.

Identifying the complete set of components that are necessary to make a thing art is not in the scope of this paper. I am merely trying to show that to be art, and not just experience, one must consider the authorial intent. Meaning is maleable and subjective, but it is necessary.

Let's consider a painting of a beautiful landscape. The authorial intent in this case was to create something that is beaufitful, something that maximizes aesthetic beauty. On a prima facie level this might be a counterargument, that is the author is merely trying to do what the hypothetical sensory inducer could do, but he is probably not doing as good of a job. I don't think that's quite right though, that the authorial intent allowed for maximizing aesthetic appeal is a laudable intentioned artwork. Intent Interpretors need not ignore aesthetic experience when considering artwork.

The neo-wittgensteninian view supposes that intention is a purpose, manifested in the artwork, which regulates what the artwork is (in a metaphysical sense, like 'what is this piece of art). In order to discover intention once must analyze the artwork. Whether authorial intent is discoverable in the actual artwork or whether it is a separate entity is not in the scope of this paper. Rather I merely wish to support the claim that in order for art to be art, and not merely an experience of something, intent must be considered. I hope I have succeeded.