Chapter 2: Viewers Make Meaning

When a teacher is teaching a child to read, they teach by meaning. A childres' book is a great example of art that creatings meanings. Chapter two begins with the sentence, "Images generate meanings." Well, I believe this to be true. Let's say a child is reading to you and stumbles across a word they do not know, what do you do? Well, first, you would try to play a sort of Taboo game with them, telling them synonyms to the word and having them try to guess it. If that does not work, then you might say, "Well hey, let's look at this picture to see what is going on here!" This is not a great example of what some people would call, "high art" or "real art" but what is "real art"? Who is to say what "real art" is. When we look at a piece of art and we do not know what the creator was meaning by it, we try to interpret what they were trying to portray, this means we discover the meaning of it. Beyond interpretation we have evaluation, where you say what you think about the artwork. A man named Frederic Jameson 'always historisized' his artwork, this means he sees it is its historical moment, place things in context relating to history. The chapter also discusses aesthetics and taste. Aesthetic is the study of beauty. Artwork is going to be judged by its audience on whether or not it is beautiful. Taste refers to a background and education. The phrase "has taste" usually means they are "in style" or apart of their time period. All images give a little hint towards their meaning to the audience. This is called encoding and decoding. The audience can, then, either disagree or agree with the author's meaning of the artwork. These terms that we use are Dominant-hegemonic reading-not questioning; Negotiated reading- interpreting the dominant meanings; or Oppositional reading- taking a different position by simply disagreeing or by rejecting the piece of art.