….meaning in art is constructed, not given, and the viewer plays a central role. Krauss emphasizes the structures that destabilize traditional meaning (like appropriation and collage), but THERE IS ANOTHER KEY VARIABLE… the human encounter that animates those structures.
So it can be said, that
Art is not a closed message but a site of open meaning, created in the tension among what is made, what is shown, and what is seen.
Rosalind Krauss argues that in the modern tradition, the notion of “originality” is destabilized. Artists quote, appropriate, reuse, and are shaped by language, culture, psyche, and history. (I would add, technology)
What is genuine art?
1. Authenticity of Process
• Even if the materials or references are borrowed, the artist’s way of engaging them—honestly, reflectively, even painfully—can produce something genuinely expressive.
• Kandinsky, Pollock, or Joan Mitchell: while abstract, they tried to reach something deeply real—through the unconscious, gesture, or intensity.
The genuine may lie in how the artist confronts their own condition, even if their tools are inherited.
Regarding Jung’s individuation stage, Art can be genuine when
1) it arises from deep psychic expressions of necessity.
2) honestly reflects a stage in one’s inner journey.
3) Non-representational art often becomes the language of the unconscious: a symbolic process rather than a literal one.
individuation can make art genuine, because it reflects an internal wholeness or struggle, not just a style or surface.
But For Adorno, art is genuine when it refuses to reconcile with society’s false narratives. These false values (exchange value) usually originating in the art marketplace… They generally support what Sells… what is, or soon becomes, the mediocrity.
We are not talking about individualism in a Romantic sense. But art can be individuated—in Jung’s sense—when it reflects a genuine movement through inner opposites, a search for synthesis or confrontation. In other words, if it reflects an inner struggle, Sometimes coniunctio (unity) is reached.
Art by Kate W 