Death of an Author

Death of an Author - Text Analysis 

What is Barthes trying to say?

• You base all the work on the author rather than the text itself - prejudgements 
• People assume the book is part of them, their lifestyle "father to his child"
• In modern life we all have different interpretations to text - no specific meaning
• "None of them original, blend and clash" - no new original ideas anymore - ideas are created from already existing ones mixed together. 
• Modern day - people don't care about the origin of work anymore, just the work itself. 

Impact on Illustration?

• Taking the style of an Illustrator - then mass producing that style
• People go straight to their own interpretation instead of the actual origin of the piece - does this make your research of beforehand useless?
• Originality dying
• Judge the work if you already think of the artist in a certain way.

Impact on my theme? - Social/Politics

• Judging a speaker/leader before listening to what they have to say 
• 'None of them original, blend and clash' - politicians ideas blend together - people don't know who to vote for anymore - one big mix. 
• 'Only language acts 'performs' and not 'me' - hiding behind words

SARA FANELLI

Sara Fanelli was the first name that came to my head when relating to the idea authorship. As you can see, her work is very stylised and oozes with charm. But, as her work isn't something particularly challenging to copy, her years of hard work got stollen and mass produced. This in turn ruined her career, the death of an illustrator. As an aspiring illustrator myself, the thought of this happening to my own work is quite terrifying. But instead of living the rest of my life being scared of style thieves, this has made me realise that my own work has to have a challenging edge so people wouldn't be tempted to copy. Or I also thought, why should I have a style? My work doesn't have one now and I don't think that it's always necessary, I feel like I'm more free for experimentation. 

 Barthes says that original ideas are dying 'None of them original, blend and clash', does this mean that Fanelli's work wasn't original in the first place? She must have other artists that inspire her to make her create the work that she produces (I did try to research what work inspires her but was not successful). Does it mean that people have to steal other artist's ideas because originality is dead anyway?  I think that this idea is quite depressing, Barthes makes me feel like we can't produce anything with any originality which makes me feel a bit brain dead. Like we're all robot sheep made to churn out previous ideas mix and matched together. But seeing as this is what happened to Sara Fanelli, it pains me to say that he's kind of right. 

'The text is henceforth made and read in such a way that at all its levels the author is absent' - My own interpretation of this statement is that the audience looks at a piece without thinking about the illustrator themselves - solely the artwork. Making the illustrator dead. I think because of this, it makes it easier for people to steal people's styles. As you don't think about the illustrator, you just see the style, like it, then take it. The same way as people eat meat because they don't see the actual animal being killed so they don't feel bad - but maybe I'm going off topic.