Eng 102-11 - Controversial Art

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As an artist, having to worry about how my sculpture or work of art will be portrayed can sometimes be too much to handle. When the artist has to create works that portray their ideas and creativeness but also know that they have to please the people can be very hard when it comes to working. This situation reminds me of when writers get what they call “writers block”. They might have an idea of what to sculpt or write but it all comes down to how they are going to present their works so that the people will be able to understand it clearly and use it in the right context. Not only can convenience and content play an impact on sculpture becoming controversial but so can the clarity of the meaning. Which leads me to my third point, talking about how meaning can affect the sculpture being represented and understood.

Every artist has a specific and different way they communicate with their audience, this is considered their rhetoric. Communication within the world of art is more complicated than it may seem to the audience. Communication starts with the artist and themselves and their idea. From the artist and themselves it moves onto the artist and the creation of the sculpture. Continuing on from the artist and the sculpture it then moves to being between the sculpture and the audience. Finally, the cycle ends with the conversation being between the audience and the artist. As one can see there are four steps to this communication cycle, that is four steps where the meaning can be considered present, lost in transition, or simply just not present at all. Although, there are four steps to the communication cycle, the artist may want to keep the meaning unclear and implied rather than the meaning being explicitly stated. Due to the artist leaving the meaning open, implied and/ or unclear this gives the audience a chance to see how they interpret the meaning for themselves. There is a chance that the audience themselves will have a bigger problem with the meaning they pick up on their own rather than what the artist explicitly states. This may be because that the audience wants to be told what to think rather than embracing the art of art and coming up with their own meanings.

An example of an unclear meaning can be found with Marco Cochrane’s Truth is Beauty sculpture, as seen pictured to the right. This sculpture depicts a fifty-five-foot-tall woman, who is in the nude and seems to be in a ballerina style pose. There is a plaque that contains a message saying “What would the world be like if women were safe?” in ten different languages. After much criticism and comments being concerned with the woman not having clothes on and being weary if children should view this sculpture there also came about very positive and inspiring comments, such as, "This is a world-class statue," Businessman Michael Fennell, 73 said, "This is not a woman cowering because the world is against her. This is a woman saying, 'Here we are! We have arrived!' I love it." (Associated Press 2016). Of course, the debates and controversy increased until the artist made a statement about his original meaning. Cochrane stated that, “She feels safe and she is loving herself in that moment, and hopefully people can feel that feeling, it is a beautiful woman, and part of it is to draw men in. Then they look down and see the message and they go, 'Ohhhh.' I hope that happens thousands of times” (Associated Press 2016). Because he wanted to see the meaning his audience had obtained from this sculpture he implied the meaning. Seeing the outcome and the rising controversy he decided to make a public statement and clarify what the original purpose and meaning behind his sculpture Truth is Beauty. As one can see the meaning can be a big factor on whether or not a sculptor becomes controversial or not. [pic 5][pic 6]

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Works Cited

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