ITAP 6

Interpretation/Testing

When getting a message across to an audience, the artist must relate to its chosen public. This can mean obviously finding ways to target a specific audience, i.e. teenagers or families, but it is first of all relating to the zeitgeist, the “spirit of the time”. People probably don’t do it all too consciously as they are living the spirit of their age and time, but looking back to past works of art or the way a single subject has been portrayed throughout the years and centuries this is very much more notable. As an example I will use Salome. This character appears for the first time in the New Testament as the stepdaughter of Herod, as an icon of female seduction, dangerous and tempting for the good man of faith. She was a favourite subject of Christian paintings, the femme fatale using her body to ask for the head of John the Baptist, the incarnation of woman’s evil power.
Come the mid-1800, the aesthetics, symbolism, dandies, and decadence, Salome was brought back to the spotlight, thanks to Oscar Wilde’s play and subsequently Richard Strauss’ opera, as a new-found symbol of female seduction. She was the perfect ideal of the woman aesthetics longed to meet. In the years she became protagonist of ballets, poems, songs, films (often transcript into modern times), sometimes going back to that judgmental Christian ideal of female perversion, sometimes as the adored seductress.

Titian

G. Moreau

H. Regnault

A. Beardsley

A. Mucha

V. Surenyants

Theda Bara in Salome

In other times, the only way to test your work was to throw it out there, show it to critics and public and see how well (or how badly) it was received, hoping for the best. Nowadays us artists are on much safer grounds. Showcases and exhibitions, however big or small, are obviously a good way to get attention and put your work on display. Our most powerful tool though is the Internet. Thanks to blogs, websites, forums, and emails we can easily display our work, ask for feedback and see what comes out of it. As most recent artists have some kind web-based portfolio, everything becomes only a few clicks away. And so getting feedback on your work, professional or just at doodle stage, is incredibly easy and immediate.