The Death of the Artist

    In “The Death of the Author”, Roland Barthes discusses the relationship between the author, their writing, and the readers - which Sherrie Levine later borrows from to apply to her art. Barthes starts by describing the idea that, contrary to what we often think and feel, the author’s words are as separate from the author as an actor is to the character they are portraying on stage. As humans, when we discover a piece of literature that piques our interest, it’s our tendency to want to research the author to better understand the person who wrote those words. Sometimes, we may even put these writers up on pedestals in our minds for having some sort of “secret” and glorify them for it.

    But Barthes argues that, no matter how an author arranges the words together on the page, all of the words have already existed and there’s no combination of words the author can arrange that would be truly original to them as an individual. By looking to the author when analyzing a text, we’re giving them too much credit and also limiting the potential for us, as readers, to make our own meaning out of their borrowed words.

    In 1982, a photographer named Sherrie Levine borrowed (or appropriated, or plagiarized,) pieces of “The Death of the Author” for her personal artist statement to apply it to her photography and art in general. Levine was a photographer most famous for her series After Walker Evans - photographs taken of original photographs by Walker Evans - and others like it. The issue of plagiarizing and how altered a work by another artist has to be to be considered acceptable appropriation into other works of art has always been a point of contention, and of course her exhibitions were highly criticized for this reason. What Levine is alluding to in her artist statement is the idea that, like the words they write do not belong to the authors, the images they make also do not belong to the artists. The importance is not on credit to the creator or even intention of the creator, but on the interpretation of the witness.

https://medium.com/artbloc/how-appropriation-killed-modernism-42fe7a4cb458 


    After reflecting for weeks on this idea, I feel inclined to pick it apart a little. The elephant in the room to me is that she - “the artist” - is making money on these exhibitions of images that she believes are as universally accessible as… words? I see where the parallel between words and images comes from, but what makes a word and what makes an image? While there is no truly original word or sentence in a language, there is a point where we consider a text to be plagiarized. Similarly, we all seem to agree that appropriation in art (the borrowing of images from other artists’ work) is fine, as long as it’s not a one-for-one reproduction.

    As a digital artist, I am constantly borrowing others’ imagery in my work, but with very careful considerations. Because while the “death of the artist” sentiment is very philosophical, and it might be true that the viewer is the one that gives meaning to the art, there still wouldn’t be art without artists the way there wouldn’t be books without authors. There would be words and images and we would make meaning out of them, but we enjoy having books and art that other humans have taken the time to curate in a way that sparks something new for us. On a philosophical level, it’s difficult to pin down whether or not an artist can “own” a creative concept, but I think on a human level it’s easier to understand that at some point we have to honor them as such.





Works Cited

Barthes, Roland. The Death of the Author. 1967.

Levine, Sherrie. Statement. 1982.

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