The Role Of Individualism In Art

During the 19th century, the idea of individualism quickly arose and became more prominent among society. Related to philosophical systems such as hedonism, humanism and existentialism, individualism is a moral stance which places the individual as above all else. Independence is greatly stressed, as well as notions of self-interest and self-importance. Originally linked to philosophers such as Robert Owen and Henry David Thoreau, ideas on individualism have had both positive and negative connotations throughout history, and have had a most profound impact on the art world and creative work in general. With regards to individualism, and in turn, the cult of the individual that emerged with it, enlightened subjectivity arose within the art world,

He states that through the death of the author, the reader is born. Barthes relates this argument to Sigmund Freud’s theories on the two states of conscious, the manifest and the latent. According to Freud, manifest content is content that we as humans are cognitively aware of thinking and experiencing, whereas the latent content is the hidden meaning, the thoughts and desires that we supress in order to belong and co-exist in society. Barthes believes that the scriptor provides us with manifest content through prose and we, the readers, must gain access to its hidden layers, the latent content. It is the reader’s job to make art reach its full potential. They are born because the scriptor does not have to understand what they produce. This in turn offsets the idea of the cult of the individual because the subjective artist believes that they are the sole origin of their ideas and the purveyor of truth about their work, whereas by placing the reader in higher regard, the role and ego of the artist is dramatically reduced because they are nothing but a mere

Aside from the main point which is that is dismantles the cult of the individual, from a critique point of view, the death of the author also completely expands the limits and possibilities of literary criticism. Certain constraints are usually enforced when the author is present because his/her background and beliefs are thus taken into consideration when one is critiquing and analysing the work at hand. This is counter-productive because this can often lead to the reader choosing to believe the meaning of the text as laid out by the author-figure and therefore disregard his/her own opinion and interpretation of the piece of prose. By removing the revered attitude towards the all-knowing, all-powerful author, and instead reducing the figure to a mere tool by which language expresses itself, one is able to further examine the text at hand and delve further into its latent content. It also expands the possibilities for