[Cass]

The fun thing about art criticism, and the reason I firmly believe in the "death of the author" school of critique, is that even the choices an artist made in the face of constraints, or as a snap decision at three am, often do carry some meaning, and not always one the artist themselves recognize, either.

Presumably they could've gone out and gotten more green. They could've transitioned to bright blue, or purple, or yellow. But they looked at the piece done in grey, and instead of going "Yikes, that's way more bleak than I thought it would be, I'm gonna buy some more green and redo this," they seem to be satisfied with the final piece.

And that means that interpretations that find meaning in the color choice aren't necessarily invalid just because the artist wasn't consciously thinking about what they were doing when they ran out of green at 3 am. Or, for that matter, that an interpretation of an art piece can't be valid just because it's counter to what the artist themselves had in mind.

[willhinsa]

I believe in “death of the author” because I know how GIF should be pronounced!

I hope this comment is a gift of laughter to you in your day.

[SllX]

Today I learned I have been pronouncing “gift” wrong my entire life and I should have been conforming to the “g” in “gif” or in “ginger”.

[jjulius]

Gee, I know some gigantic, gentle, geriatric giraffes who would take umbridge with that pronunciation.

[karmakaze]

Does this mean that 'char' is also pronounced 'care'?

[echelon]

I like that we're looking at random gesticulations in state space traversal and ascribing complex social meaning to them.

Nobody ever ponders whether the artist's blood sugar was low or if their gut microbiome was misbehaving.

I think it speaks volumes for how the human brain works. How we interpret the world and look for the meaning in things.

[dTal]

https://xkcd.com/904/

[vidarh]

The problem I have with this is that you rarely have the information to do anything more than take wild guesses, and way to often it is used to make confident assertions without basis in anything but preconceptions.

It makes me see art criticism as largely an exercise in fiction writing.