I'm a beautiful lady sir who is also a Cyclopean morass of contradictions.
I have to remind myself that someone misinterpreting my writing doesn't matter so long as... It doesn't harm them, I suppose? I used to care a lot that my work had a message or a theme to follow, but it's also quite possible that theme emerges organically, whether you wanted it to or not.
At the same time, I'm a human being, and I feel the need to correct people.
As such, I find myself trying to correct... Myself. And this ends up in me not finishing any of my art, because perfectionism plagues me, while Stephanie Meyer and E.L. James roll their sweaty butts all over a stack of hunneds.
Which got me to wondering: what does it mean to have a meaningful, impactful work of art? Because the nature of art criticism has gotten to the point that anything can be ascribed some greater meaning... Even those works that don't have anything to say, whether it's Ghost Recon: Wildlands, Ekaterina, or some surreal dadaist whatever.
As a writer, I prefer happy endings, because I feel it's a nice reward for the audience for having put up with the plot. At the same time, some artists have made amazing statements that were rather depressing, but also at the same time, people have found hope even in the darkest places. I have also noticed that other works of art end up having some kind of story or plot to them. Dances, paintings, sculptures, action and reaction syncing together into a cohesive, coherent meaning.
Lovecraftian fiction, Stanley Kubrick's The Shining (said by Stephen King himself to be "a movie meant to hurt people"), paintings that I used to gawk at when I was a younger boy because it was basically porn, only for them to now be censored because obscenity has now been mandated to be subjective, and bad parents are taking that in full stride.
It made me wonder just how entirely valid the death of the author is, and just how important, IMO, audience discourse is. Because if you think about it, everyone becomes an artist sometimes, especially when they get to the point that they're analyzing art and wondering how they could do it better, IF they could.
What do you guys think? Are messages in art necessary? Inevitable? Obscene? Should artists strive towards it, or avoid it or something in the middle? Is it pointless? Is being deep good? Can being a shallow work be a good thing? Can there even be such a thing as art with no theme?
IMO, I feel that you should at least be thinking about what you want to say. The voice of the author matters, at the very least, before you publish your work for others to experience...
Or fucking does it I honestly don't fucking know anymore.
For those of you wondering, Ghost Recon: Wildlands is a video game where you play a team of special forces soldiers tasked by the CIA to get... Revenge? For a double agent assassinated by a global superpower drug cartel. It was written by people pretending to be Tom Clancy. As is typical of blockbuster video games, there was never meant to be a theme or message to the work, as that would mean they would sell less copies. While I can appreciate the hustle, goddamn the story is boring and I have no idea who I'm supposed to root for, which results in the story feeling kind of pathetic, since it's rather painfully obvious the writers didn't really care or have passion for the story they were writing, which is sad and depressing.
Ekaterina is a strange novel, essentially a homage to Nabokov's Lolita, about a former Baltic princess who moves to the United States and has trysts with young boys as a teacher and artist, a best-seller in it's day but forgotten today. Unlike in Lolita, however, the main character, who is a bare bones pedophile, ends up simply abandoning the boys she abused, moving on with her life, almost as if it was the boy's fault. I'm not sure if it's supposed to be a deconstruction of Nabokov, if we're meant to sympathise with a pedophile or realize their lives were empty as pedophiles, it's weird, whereas Humbert Humbert was indeed always a farcical, if bumblingly tragic, character.
Both of them prompted me to ask this question.
