M A R M

media club plus will cover fullmetal alchemist before shelved by genre does, if ever

which is the following contradiction:

• An author's material conditions shape their worldview and their lived experience, and all of those will have some impact on any artistic work they produce
• As a reader, you may not have access to that information, whether due to the obscurity or privacy of the author or just not having the time, resources, or expertise to find out yourself. I don't think it's unreasonable to assume that many casual readers don't look up and read the bio of every single author they read.
• If you take the lens of biography as an essential or principal tool of understanding an art object, and the average reader is likely missing that information, then you assert that an average or casual reader cannot form a meaningful interpretation of the work.

And that's just not my experience of reading media. Interacting with the work itself produces an affect and meaning regardless of whether you know who made it or not. And many art objects are the products of many people working as a team. In that case, whose biography do we focus on? It's unreasonable to expect someone to look up the previous work and personal details of the hundreds or thousands of people who touch a video game or movie... And yet its undeniable that those details matter.
Every time I engage wirh media crit that focuses on the biography of the artists who made it, this problem sticks in my head and I just can't square the circle. Maybe it's just because I don't have a liberal arts degree lol. Genuinely if anyone has thoughts about this problem I would love to understand others' perspectives on it.