Since I am in CALS and spend a lot of time on the Ag Quad, I don’t get a lot of opportunities to enjoy Cornell’s other highlights, such as the Johnson Museum. I was able to go at night once the first day of orientation, but after that, I found myself too busy to visit. I enjoy looking at art, and from a young age, I have always had a lot of respect and appreciation for artists. Back home I would often visit the art museum, and I have missed going since coming here, so this event was a great chance for me to visit an art museum again. I enjoyed seeing various art pieces and listening to Professor Schwartz explain how to look at art. He mainly talked about the historical contexts behind the art and how they add to the meaning. For example, we looked at one sculpture of a tall, slender man cast from bronze that was created in the 1960s, and Professor Schwartz talked about how the artist was using the piece as a commentary on the effect of the Holocaust and atomic bomb.

The SA for the event raised this question, but I was also wondering the same thing. I think that it’s a similar problem in both interpreting literature and art, but I always wonder where the line is drawn between what the artist intended the piece to mean and what the viewer is simply extrapolating. More so, does it even matter? As soon as an artist releases a piece to the public, does their own perception of what it means (if they even have one) even matter anymore, or is all that matters what the piece means to the individual? Viewers pick up on the most minute of details, and it’s hard for me to believe that one line or word can hold so much intentional meaning. Especially in being an artist myself, I think that artists simply produce what they feel the need to and aren’t necessarily consciously thinking through the exact meaning of every stroke. It seems to me that the majority of a piece’s meaning is determined by the audience.