CFP: SECAC Session on Contemporary Art

Who Cares Who Sees?
The Problem of Audience in Contemporary Art

Panel at the Southeastern College Art Conference (SECAC 2010)
http://www.secollegeart.org/

2010 October 20-23, Virginia Commonwealth University (Richmond VA)

In his famous discussion of the "Death of the Author" (1967) Roland
Barthes sealed the fate of authorial intention as the locus of artistic
meaning. Literary critics, Barthes argued, were driven by the mistaken
desire to "assign a 'secret' ultimate meaning" to a text. But because "We
can never know" for certain what an author meant, it followed for Barthes
that the only meaning we could know was how something was understood by
its readers and viewers.
To tie a work to a single author was, Barthes insisted, to "impose a limit
on that text." When the text was rid of its author, meaning became
open-ended. So what began as skepticism of authorial meaning ends in the
liberation of meanings. Barthes reasoned that the unity of the text was
not at its origin the author--"but in its destination"--the audience.

This session aims to analyze this largely held assumption about the death
of the author and the birth of the audience. Although this view has held
ground for nearly fifty years, does it make sense? Papers will revisit the
history of intention and anti-intentionalism, and ask whether, and how,
the viewer of a work is relevant to its meaning.

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