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Populär Culture Review
should gamer a changing answer as the artist him-or herseif changes (and as the
context changes around the artist). Meaning in art, as with meaning in all things,
is a communal project that founds objectivity on intersubjectivity. The author’s
intent is of no more importance necessarily than any other “fact” we might bring
to the discussion.
But with conceptual art such a claim is controversial. Unless the artist
explains that the couple of centimeters of brass you are looking at are only the
tip of the kilometer-long rod buried in the ground, unless Rauschenberg teils us
that it is a drawing by Willem De Kooning that he has erased and is now calling
his own work of art,4 unless, that is, we know the author’s intent and story, we
don’t really get the full picture and thus the full aesthetic experience. At a point
in history when the art object itself was becoming less fetishized and thus less
important, the artist him-or herseif was interestingly becoming more importa