Can the artist be separated from his work?

Couple rehearsal

Students:
Andriu Aguilar
CI: 30.527. 763

Franco Torin
CI: 28.466.818
 The culture of cancellation is based on stopping consuming its content so that the creator
stops receiving income for considering that he / she committed an immoral act and sustaining
this consumption makes us indirectly complicit in these immoral acts. Which makes me
wonder… What about this author's work? Most of the time the work is not related to the
immoral act that he himself committed, but under this logic and understanding that we cannot
separate the work of its author, we are accepting that the work that he made is impregnated
with the intention of these immoral acts Therefore, continuing to consume this content makes
us preachers of that same immorality. And yes, although this problem has become notorious
with the new generations branded as "crystal generation" and it is certainly a subject which is
debated from a large number of points of view, it is not a new subject, and it goes back
decades to the discussion about the role that intentionality plays in artistic interpretation. One
of the most beautiful things that art and therefore literature has is the infinity of experiences
that interpretive openness offers us, a work of art has an inexhaustible reserve of meanings
which allows us to always reinterpret it again without the authorial intention or the literal
meaning forces us to accept a final result and from this perspective it is very easy to accept
the separation of the artist from his work because the interpretation of it is left in our hands,
leaving aside the author's point of view, but not all the world thinks so. On the one hand we
have the intentionalists, who consider that the works have a unique meaning to which we can
only access if we can decipher the meaning that the author transmitted through his
intentionality. "Like every YING that has its YANG" the intentionalists have their counterpart,
the anti-intentionalists this group affirms that the authorial considerations are irrelevant or that
they should not even be taken into account regarding the consumption of the work. Why?
Because they understand that there are two types of intention, on the one hand we have the
intention that the author wanted to reflect in his work, which can be evidenced internally or
externally. Internal? I am referring to the structure of a song if we are talking about a singer or
the syntax if we are talking about a poem, or the external evidence which is private and has
not so much to do with the work or how it was performed but rather with the author, books he
has read, letters or even the reasons that pushed the author to do this work and then there
are other “semi-private” factors that have to do with the context that surrounded the author at
the time of giving birth to the work, for example , the artistic movement to which he belonged.
In short, the work must stand on its own and say what it says, for what it is and not for the
intentions of the creator when making it. To close, can the author be separated from his work?
Separating the author can be difficult, but not impossible and this is an answer which does not
contemplate all cases, since it is necessary to analyze each work and understand how
committed it is to the author's intentionality and even debate whether this intentionality is
impregnated with those characteristics from which we want to separate the author of his work,
and a recent example of this is the unsuccessful cancellation attempt by Michael Foucault, it
has nothing to do with the lack of support or information about the accusation or that it has
already been denied, but because the person who made this accusation (Guy Sorman -
Journalist) invited people to reinterpret Foucault's work based on this prejudice, as if his work
were impregnated with the immorality of the acts that are accused. The author is a
fundamental piece to create a work, but this work must stand on its own and independently of
the author who created it or the contexts that are also important for the interpretation, but that
we should not think that they are conditioning factors. its meaning, in short, let us learn once
and for all that if we can kill the author, but not for that we should kill his work.