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Originally Posted by st.cronin
The artist owes his EXISTENCE to the audience. Obviously much of the audience for this show was ok with this ending, so that's not really an issue, but to suggest that the artist has no debt to the audience is just nonsense. Without an audience, Chase's story would take place entirely in his head, or on his laptop. So of course he has a debt to the audience - or, perhaps more accurately, the work has a debt to the audience.
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No, he doesn't. My book comes out at the end of the month, and nothing in it has been written to satisfy any kind of audience outside of myself. Would it do better sales-wise if I revised the poems inside to suit the most popular mode of contemporary poetry? Probably, but it'd be a weaker collection for those changes.
The fact that other people might be interested in a work is almost entirely independent of its artistic value, particularly because of the nature of the critic vs. the amateur. The more achieved a work, the more critically-minded people will be compelled to seriously consider it. A poem like "Dulce et Decorum Est" would be just as achieved a piece of art if nobody had ever discovered it. In fact, important artists are rediscovered from time to time precisely because the audience of the time didn't notice/accept/praise the work.
Even if one expects that there will be an audience, the decision to give them what they're probably already expecting vs. following your own vision is a tricky one. I tend to side with the camp that feels art gives us experiences we wouldn't have generated on our own, and the experience generated by the finale of The Sopranos certainly did that for most of the audience.
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Originally Posted by JPhillips
But saying that the audience is part of the equation is much different than arguing that the artist's work has a debt to that audience.
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This is more accurate. Audience consideration always plays some kind of role, if only when one is thinking "Well, how will this be read/interpreted?" It's just up to each artist to decide whether they're willing to adjust their vision to fit their perception of the audience's reaction. For major film and television projects, that almost always ties into how one can achieve the widest audience possible. It's refreshing that The Sopranos was successful enough on its own terms that the pressure to satisfy the widest audience wasn't enough to alter Chase's vision for the finale. Giving up one's own expectations is part of the joy of art -- we are
supposed to be surprised by great work, because it defies or readjusts our expectations.
Art is a combination of voice/vision and craft. The finale of The Sopranos masterfully displayed both. The best art generates debate, because it challenges us to interpret something that doesn't fit into our pre-defined expectations (such as advertising, which nobody argues much about, except for when it defies tradition). The Sopranos finale is generating a discussion of aesthetic theory on a forum devoted to a text football sim -- I'd say that's a pretty good indication that there is at least some artistic merit to the episode based on that reason alone, outside of all of the other good reasons to discuss it.
We've had this discussion before, actually...a forum search would yield more discussion of the issue.