I only got a few questions right, and oddly enough, they were all the exact same questions Jay got right. Even the Iggy Pop one, which I'd assume is pretty obscure?
While the new popularly understood theory which kael asserts the plain sanity of, is that a great master of expression will achieve unity in his works between intentions and content. There should not be an incongruence between the director's vision and the whole work.
What if the artist's intention IS to foster an incongruence between his vision and the whole work? Can he do so?
What if the artist deliberately limits his vision, in order to ensure unity between intentions and content? If I hand you a blank page, and tell you my intention was to draw an invisible polar bear, does that qualify me as a great master of expression?
Or what if the incongruence between an artist's vision and the whole work happens to be exactly what elevates the work to the level of the sublime? Is anyone truly interested in defending a theory that suggests neither Ed Wood, nor Neil Breen, nor CWC, are great masters of expression?
Also, bit of an epistemological side question: how does one determine authorial intent?
Really determine intent, get right inside the author's head before he commits the work, in order to see the vision exactly as it was?
Is it ever possible to do this? And if it is not possible, then under the theory you propose, can we ever
really ever say anything meaningful, with a reasonable degree of confidence, about an artist's mastery of expression?
It seems to me that this theory would make the evaluation of an artist inaccessible to anyone save (maybe) the artist himself, and would mean that artistic greatness is something we can only ever guess at. And if that is the case, why even bother with sophisticated criticism at all? You're just guessing, and we have no way of evaluating whether your analysis is sound.