"How does the situation of seeing affect the content or meaning of a work of art?"
The reading discussed how the way we see and interpret art work depends on our relation to it. When an image is presented to us as a work of art we begin to judge it by the inherent assumptions associated with art (beauty, truth, genius, etc.). When we view art, we are seeing the subject as the artist saw the subject and not the subject itself. For example, the painter Hals painted his wealthy clients as seen through the eyes of a pauper, regardless of how objective he attempted to be. In the same way, our persepective makes us and our understanding of artwork the center of the world because we can only see it in relation to ourselves. Cameras destroyed that idea through the reproduction of the same image, turning it into multiple fragments with a variety of interpretations depending on the setting. It made the content and meaning depend on where you were standing and when. The uniqueness of the content was removed. Reproduction can also isolate elements of a painting and change their significance. For example, if Venus and Mars by Boticelli were to be cropped and reproduced only as the image of Venus, it would change the content of the work from an allegory of beauty and valor to a portrait of a girl. The article goes on to discuss that this is why the art of the past no longer has the same meaning it did when it was originally produced, especially in the case of religious images which no longer have the authority they once did.
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