When deciding which questions I wanted to ask Yun-Fei Ji on Wednesday I had some interesting thoughts about how he might respond to what I asked. Although I did not get to ask him this question, I wanted to know whether or not he had a favorite piece in the exhibition. This got me thinking about the artist’s perception of his/her own artwork. Surely an artist’s judgment of a piece of art must differ in some ways from that of the casual observer. An artist judges more than the aesthetic quality of the art and the underlying motifs and themes (that an observer may judge) because he/she knows what his/her intentions were. I imagine this struggle between perception and reality as being similar to what it is like to visit somewhere for the first time. For example, when your friend talks about his house repeatedly you develop a perception in your mind’s eye of what your friend’s house looks like. When you finally visit, however, it is almost invariably far from what you imagined. Similarly, I imagine that an artist’s final product often strays from what he/she originally intended. Perhaps the discrepancy is a good thing, and changes were made throughout the process to enhance the quality of the final product. On the other hand, errors in execution may cause the final product to be different from the intended product in a negative way. Even if the intended product and the perceived product are in agreement, the author’s knowledge of a difference in intention and reality (or a lack thereof) adds an extra level of judgment when considering his/her own piece.
I experienced this phenomenon myself while working on my collaborative project. Our initial idea was similar to what we finished with, but we made small changes along the way that changed what I was expecting our project to look like. When others look at our project they may find it to be aesthetically pleasing, have an interesting commentary, and resemble the work of Francisco Goya, but they will never know (for better or for worse) what we expected the work to look like. As a novice artist, I do not have a lot of experience comparing perception and reality, so I would be interested to know what some of the artists in our class think about this. Is this ever a source of frustration, or is this something you hardly even consider? Do you think knowing what your initial intentions for a piece were adds an extra level of judgment for your own work?
