One of the strangest parts of our discussion in last week’s Arts in NY seminar was when Professor French mentioned that some artists do not consider their work an expression of themselves, but rather an expression of God. My initial reaction to that was “huh?” Ultimately I found I was in conflict with myself. On one hand I understood how the artist could claim the idea was God’s revelation to them because at times art is just made on impulse; you don’t know where you got the idea all you know is that you have it, and you express it. In that case it would be conceivable that the idea was simply sent to you by God. On the other hand however, I thought the statement was incredibly blasphemous! How could someone claim to be depicting the message of God without also deifying him or herself? In a way they would just be claiming that they somehow, were at a level closer to God than the average person.

This conundrum brought me to a topic that has made its way into nearly every one of our lessons so far: Who has the right to transcribe art?

In my opinion only the artist has that right because it is their idea and no matter how much of a connoisseur you are of the arts, you would not be able to express the emotion behind the artist’s intention since you did not experience what the artist did when the work was created.  I therefore believe that no one, aside from the artist, should transcribe a work of art because this only takes away from the artist’s intention and implements your own idea. I also believe that if the artist wants to claim that the work was a message from God then this would be rather beneficial to the cause because it could limit the possibilities of what the work represents which would leave less room for misinterpretation.