The writer of this article has chosen to remain anonymous.
Revaluation.
I want to start by speaking on ‘revaluation’ as a practice. Seemingly since the start of the covid pandemic, there has become a continuously growing number of people beginning to reevaluate their relationships and habits within their own lives. This practice ranges anywhere from relationships with narcissistic family and friends or even with vegetables. Vegetables as in, people are beginning to stop eating their vegetables and are opting for the far healthier option - twelve eggs deep fried in a gallon of butter, alongside 3 avocados, raw honey, a pound of ground beef cooked to death, and a go-getting attitude.
Revaluation has slowly become a practice of impressionable followers beginning to believe that the government and sunscreen shall no longer be trusted because they have accidentally stumbled across a misappropriated quote of George Orwell’s 1984 on their neighbourhood Facebook forum, which someone has kindly stolen from Twitter. Anyways, my point begins here. Revaluation should not be an excuse to believe whatever you want. It should be a carefully and closely analysed process, which starts by challenging our biases and asking why we do the things we do. Simply, revaluation should be thoughtful and thorough.
Revaluating.
In this article, we reevaluate our relationships with our favourite creators (musicians, painters, writers. There will be no discussion of a higher theological power.). When we consume art, should we care who the creator is? We tend to ask this question more often than we would probably imagine, however it is most commonly brought up in extreme circumstances. Everybody begins to panic because a popular artist was involved in a workplace sexual harassment or rather quite the opposite, as people become enamoured by an artist deciding to take public transportation like the rest of us. As we continue to lose our minds into the post Era’s Tour universe, we find ourselves an ideal moment to take a deep breath and to ask, why do we care about the creator?
This answer depends on how you view the world. For example, somebody who tends to evaluate the world through an individualist and exceptionalist lens, will tend to believe art is created by the excellence of the individual. They emphasise the brilliance of the individual and often believe that because they have such special talent, it is only natural that they deserve all the credit. Why would they not get the credit? Is enjoyment of art not solely due to the creator? This belief places tremendous credibility and responsibility upon artists and creators which is reflected in awards shows like the Grammy’s. When Beyonce wins Album of the Year for her 2024 release Cowboy Carter, it is Beyonce’s award and Beyonce’s album. It is believed that Beyonce has exhibited individual excellence to win this award, therefore she has been rewarded accordingly. This thinking, however, is somewhat flawed. If we take a moment to read the credits of each song in the album, we can observe the multitude of producers and collaborators that made the record possible. Therefore, it becomes an appropriate question to ask, is Beyonce entirely to credit for this album? (This can apply to any singer with a production team, making a point out of Beyonce is not my aim). This reasoning is flawed to a further extent and can be explained by French semiologist and literary theorist, Roland Barthes.
Without getting too bogged down in literary theory, I want to summarise Barthes’ The Death of the Author (1967). Barthes states that the discovery of the “prestige of the individual” is the “epitome and culmination of capitalist ideology, which has attached the greatest importance to the ‘person’ (creator/author)”. Barthes’ distaste for the ‘prestige of the individual stems from two factors. The first being, if we believe that the author is the sole creator and lifeline of a piece of work, then we are restricting ourselves from the potential meaning and function of an artwork. If we look at the creator for meaning, then we restrain ourselves to the creators’ interpretation or intentions, which is only one of many. The second factor is linguistics. Barthes does not believe in the author, instead describes them as masters of lyrical code, and would be better titled as the “modern scripter”. This is explained through linguistic theory. When we read a sentence, particularly in fiction, we are unable to trace its voice or its origins because “language knows a ‘subject’, not a ‘person’”, therefore “writing is the destruction of every voice, of every point of origin”.
For example, if we are to imagine a tree as a piece of art, we would be quick to assume that the seed would be its origin. However, this cannot be determined. Every branch, leaf and flower are the destruction of every voice and origin, as each element would express the voice of the collective network rather than the individual seed. The seed is rather the master interpreter, in which it consumes information from its environment, and begins the laborious process of growing the tree. This should not diminish the importance of the seed; however, it gets us to recognize the collective effort to grow a tree.
Revaluated.
The Death of the Author challenges the origin of a piece of work and reconsiders how we should view the artist, without diminishing them entirely. It forces us to take a step back and consider the importance of the collective rather than the individual. The next time we watch an artist being praised for their individual excellence, we can recognize their brilliance, whilst also taking time to acknowledge the environment they have been able to grow from. This will tether the individual to the collective and will prevent them from becoming Gods amongst men. The more we worship creators, the more isolated they become and the richer they get. They no longer become productive members of the collective but rather weeds which emotionally and financially feed off the people who worship them. The complicated origins of art should remind us to be inspired rather than obsessed, and in the end, we should all hope to be inspiring rather than worshipped.
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