If you study 10,000 different selected artworks over the span of your life, then you’re bound to end up learning an immense amount about art, but if you study only one artwork over that same time person, then you’ll learn an immeasurable amount about yourself. If you stare at anything long enough, regardless of the surface or composition, you’ll find that whatever you’re looking at will, in time, become a mirror. All you’ll see reflecting back is yourself.

The irony, of course, is that all art really is, at all times, just mirrors to ourselves. Works of art only seem to be the most subjective and general when they’re the freshest in the mind, but the longer you study the same thing, the more the cracks of interpretation begin to show, and the more freedom of interpretation can be placed on an artwork, the more the artwork begins to reflect the viewer.

I often wonder, then, about the discussion of separating art and artists. Where is a line to be drawn? How much of art is a reflection of its creator, and how much of art, in terms of its interpretation, are a reflection of the audience? I find it hard to reconcile, because I’m split: I understand both sides to the debate. I empathize with those that state that the art and the artist are inherently inseperable, as after all, good art is made as an expression of the self. It’s like Lord Henry states in Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray:

“Good artists simply exist in what they make, and consequently are perfectly uninteresting in what they are. A great poet, a really great poet, is the most unpoetical of all creatures. But inferior poets are absolutely fascinating.”

The only way that I can somewhat manage to reconcile this is by reframing how I view the relationship between an artist and their creations. Rather than seeing it as though the artist affects the nature of their art, the art one creates affects the nature of the artist (at least, considerably more than the opposite). Take the nasty creation of Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler. I feel as though Hitler’s status speaks less to the state of Mein Kampf as being a particularly evil book as compared to the Mein Kampf taken as-is, with an objective understanding of its hateful rhetoric, proving Hitler’s status as a demagogue. In other words, Mein Kampf speaks to the interpretation of Hitler’s character less than Hitler speaks to the interpretation of Mein Kampf’s character.

However, of course, the reality is that the two things, taken as something like seperate beings, affect each other. Hitler is present in Mein Kampf just as Mein Kampf is present in Hitler. They are connected, but this dynamic is not an equal relationship. Thus why this is the best I have been able to do to solve this problem, because its easy to simplify the relationship between an artist and their art, but the reality is that the power of art comes from the complexity in this relationship. The art you create can have as much power over you as you have over it.

Similarly, I often wonder about how much control artists have over the state and interpretation of their works. Personally, I’m a firm believer of “death of the author.” I see art is something like a living thing, where each artwork has a voice and personality and convictions of their own, things that are entirely seperate and perhaps unbeknownst to its creator. From the moment the work is published, the artist provides an interpretation of the work just as much as the audience does. Art is immutable: at all times, art cannot actually be changed. Every step of the creation of art, even in formulation before physical development, sees the production of an entirely unique piece of art to whatever step preceded it. As such, recalls, post-production changes, and the like cannot change or fix the art that exists, it simply introduces a new piece to replace the old one.

I think art is a fleeting, living thing. The best explanation I can give for this, metaphysically, is by challenging the notion we have of how we perceive things (like events and people) to be true or objective. One of the questions science still has yet to answer in any satisfactory sense is what information actually is. We know how to represent information, and we have an understanding that our senses perceive the truth, but we don’t quite know what the truth is. We know that our senses don’t actually perceive the truth, they perceive our truth, such as how our eyes view microscopic predictions of time to account for the lag in processing to the brain. We also perceive the world as continuous, both in time and space, but in terms of space, we know that the world is actually atomic (or discrete). If we have been able to prove our sense of the world as continuous wrong, how could time not be as well?

With all of this background, I think that art is like a living information (and something like an ethereal being), always in existence yet choosing when to reveal itself first an artist to be translated into a form we can understand. The author must be intellectually poised in such a way that they can find the art in its ethereal plane to translate it down to us, and in that transcription, the art and the artist get mixed together. However, the fundamental principles of the art always existed, and more importantly, the full extent of the artwork is something beyond the understanding of even the artist, let alone the audience. It’s something subconscious, not literal. Art isn’t one truth, it’s the conglomerate of all of the truths that are interpreted by all of the people that perceive the art.