Popular Culture Review Vol. 24, No. 1, Winter 2013 | Page 16

12 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