Salvador Dalí as Fanartist

[amalnahurriyeh]

I visited my father-in-law a while back. He loves--absolutely loves--British murder mysteries on TV. They were, in fact, all we watched the entire time we were visiting him, because he as about eleventy billion episodes downloaded and burned on DVD. We were about to watch Sherlock Holmes, and were discussing different importations of Holmes into

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[amalnahurriyeh]

I'm fascinated by the change as well. It doesn't necessarily make the painting better or worse for me--though, I'm not very interested in it as it stands. What it does is make it more interesting, because it disrupts the easy notion of author/painter/creator=unequivocally right. It makes it clear that artists make *choices* and that multiple outcomes are possible. It's not that those layers were never there (Dalí saw that "something" was going on without the x-rays, even though I think his reading of the woman's body language is his own gynophobia and not supported by the work), but that now we get to see them in a way previously undiscovered. Seeing how the sausage is made and all that.

Doing the both/and thing is incredibly hard--mostly because it's often hard to settle into thinking that way. I struggle with being terribly binary all the time, myself. I often comment that a career in postmodern theory and theories of contestation is basically the worst career possible for me, a binary thinker who hates arguing. And yet, I think it's *right*, so I continue to do it. Apparently.

[notacrnflkgirl]

"It makes it clear that artists make *choices* and that multiple outcomes are possible."

That remaining faithful to the artist's vision does not necessarily mean discounting the less-popular theories.

"I struggle with being terribly binary all the time, myself."

Really? I wouldn't have guessed. Is it an ambivalence thing, by any chance?