Essay quotes

Authorship over interactivity? Do you need to sacrifice one for the other?

Eames chairs- Function with authorship- rip off ones

Can’t copyright an idea- is authorship unable to be copied?

Is the author the paint manufacturer or the artists or the audience?

Who owns packaging- designer? But want it to be accessable, so audience? Or is it used (Given purpose) by the product? Or is it joint authorship?

Art’s purpose is to be inclusive and interpreted by people- thinking of liminal spaces- can it exist without interactivity?



‘Art is what someone takes responsibility for’- Beöthy

‘Practice of attaching a name to every artefact’- Beöthy

‘The author is posited as the centre of the work: the origin of all the works meaning’ – Allen pg.73

‘the Author is supposed to feed the book, i.e., he lives before it, thinks, suffers, lives for it; he has the same relation of antecedence with his work that a father sustains with his child’ – Barthes pg.52 *** (Allen pg.74)

‘The meaning of the word ‘author’ has shifted significantly through history and has been the subject of intense scrutiny over the last 40 years’ – Rock

 ‘Shift in the late 1960’s from the notion of the artist as being the sole determinant of the meaning of an artwork to the notion that the audience brings their own interpretation’ – Beöthy

‘The ‘aura’ of a text or practice is its sense of ‘authenticity’, ‘authority’, ‘autonomy’ and ‘distance’’- Storey pg.69

‘The decay of the aura detaches the text or practice from the authority and rituals of tradition. It opens them to plurality of reinterpretation, freeing them to be used in other contexts, for other purposes’ – Storey, pg.69

‘of ‘mechanical reproduction’, his view that is begins with the process of a move from an ‘auratic’ culture to a ‘democratic’ culture in which meaning is no longer seen as unique, but open to question, open to use and mobilisation’ – Storey pg.69


‘the author is… the ideological figure by which one marks the manner in which we fear the proliferation of meaning’ – Foucalt pg.159


From a shared understanding, ‘common knowledge’- Storey (2008)

‘The connotative sign consists of both parts of the denotative sign as well as the additional meaning or meanings which they have helped to generate’- Silverman pg.27

‘That is to say, an artist has at his or her disposal various devices for engaging our attention, drawing us into the world of the painting, and colouring our view of that world’ – O’toole pg.11

‘However much our ultimate interpretations may differ, I want to claim that the responses evoked in us by the systems of this function are virtually universal’ – O’toole pg.11

Middleton- 1990 at what point does the audience have an impact on the meaning of art?

‘A text is structured as much by what is absent (what is not said) as by what is present (what is said)’ – Althusser pg.67 *** Storey pg.72


‘One clear sign of such transference of authorial power appears in the readers abilities to choose his or her way through the metatext, to annotate texts written by others, and to create links between documents written by others’ – Landow pg.90

‘The exclusive concentration of artistic talent in particular individuals, and its suppression in the broad mass which is bound up with this, is a consequence of division of labour’ – Marx pg.109

‘In reducing the autonomy of the text, hypertext reduces the autonomy of the author’ – Landow pg.90


‘the author is also that figure towards which all reading should direct itself’- Allen pg.73

‘the author thus gives stability and order to the work’ – Allen pg.74

‘making explicit what is implicit in the text, to make audible that which is merely a whisper’ – Storey pg.75

‘a social formation consists of three practices: the economic, the political and the ideological. The relationship between the base and the superstructure is not one of expression, i.e. the superstructure being and expression or passive reflection of the base, but rather the superstructure is seen as necessary to the existence of the base.’ – Althusser pg.113 *** Storey pg.71

Macdonald- 2013 Common liminal spaces- require movement in them to fulfil their purpose

‘We know now that a text consists not of a line of words, releasing a single ‘theological’ meaning (the ‘message’ of the Author-God), but of a multi dimensional space in which are married and contested several writings, none of which is original: the text is a fabric of quotations, resulting from a thousand sources of culture’ Barthes pg.52-3*** (Allen pg. 76)

‘Creator is only ‘past’ of image, no longer have any control over it’ - Macdonald

Creating a ‘pass the parcel effect to design and art’- Irvin

 ‘here too the difference between “human” and “unique” labour amounts to sheer nonsense’ – Marx pg.109

‘Can authorship and appropriation exist together?’- Irvin

‘mass taste could be educated to accept mass-produced products’ - Miles

‘illustrated the significance that designer labels played in young peoples lives’ - Miles

‘Authorship may suggest new approaches to the issue of the design process in a profession traditionally associated more with communication rather than the origination of the message’ - Rock


‘The earliest definitions are not associated with writing per se, but rather denote ‘the person who originates or gives existence to anything’’ - Rock



O’toole, M. (2011) The Language of Displayed Art, 2nd ed, Oxon: Routledge
Althusser, L. (1969) For Marx, London: Allen Lane
Marx, K. (1970) The German Ideology, London: Lawrence and Wishart
Rock, M. (1996) The Designer as Author, Eye no. 20 vol. 5 1996
Landow, G.P. (1992) Reconfiguring the Author in ‘Hypertext: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology’, Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press
Miles, S. (1998) Consumerism as a way of life, Oxford: Sage
Barthes, R. (1968) The Death of the Author, London: Fontana
Allen, G. (2003) Roland Barthes- Routledge Critial thinkers, London: Routledge
Foucalt, M. (1979) Textual Strategies:Perspectves in Post-Structuralist Critisism, New York: Cornell University Press
Storey, J. (2008) Cultural Theory and Popular Culture, 5th ed, London: Pearson
Middleton, D. & Edwards, D. (1990) Collective Remembering, London: Sage Publications
Berger, J. (1972) Ways of Seeing, Harmondsworth: Penguin
Lidwell, W., Holden, K. & Butler, J. (2010) Universal Principals of Design, Massachusetts: Rockport Publishers
Brent Plate, S. (2002) Religion, Art, and Visual Culture- A Cross-Cultural Reader, New York: Palgrave
Silverman, K. (1983) The Subject of Semiotics, Oxford University Press: New York

John Berger / Ways of Seeing, Episode 4 (1972) [video] BBC4, available: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5jTUebm73IY>. [12/01/17]

Internet:
Beöthy, B. (2013) Internet
MacDondald, L. (2013) Internet
Irvin, S. (2005) Internet