Who creates the Work of Art?

Rudolf Arnheim, in "Art and Visual Perception", comments that "the forces to characterize the meaning of the story (of a work of art) come alive in the observer and produce the kind of stirring participation that distinguishes artistic experience from the detached acceptance of information"


James Elkins in "Critical Theory 22", points to this concept, "works of art have nothing to say except what we say to them they do not speak for themselves, viewers speak for the works, for example viewers put meanings, depending on their experiences, into the works they look at this position called reception theory holds that art is not a body of works but is rather an activity of perceivers making sense of images. A work does not have meaning in itself; it can mean something only to someone in the context"

I know also that there is a continuity of symbol over the millennia of human culture. This symbol is both art object and spiritual icon. I have experienced this at the Catholic mass. When at the moment the Priest holds the pure circle of the Host, named Christ, high above the congregation I am transported back to a time in Ancient Egypt as the Pharaoh Akhenaten stood to worship the disk of the rising Sun, named Aten-Ra. These simple gestures, seemingly separated by time and space, are in fact the same moment. This is the preeminent critical gesture. It is the intuitive, elemental, symbolic act. It is the essence of being human.

In “Eye and Mind” Merleau-Ponty tells us that, “A human body is present when, between the see-er and the visible, between touching and touched, between one eye and the other, between hand and hand a kind of crossover occurs, when the spark of the sensing/sensible is lit, when the fire starts to burn that will not cease until some accident befalls the body, undoing what no accident would have sufficed to do…”

I have come to understand that there is central dispute among art historians and critics about who actually creates a work of art. The question being this, is it the artist or the viewer. I must ask, “Why so serious?” When in fact we must surely say it is the interaction of the three factors involved; artist, artwork, and viewer, which are together the creation of art.

Joe