Skakespeare or Shady

Here is the where a thought talk done Sunday lead.

There are people for and against music of all kinds and we call those tastes. You can stereotype tastes with a stereotyped person. In this thought talk it was said that classical music and Voltaire appeal to the more intellectual taste. Rap music seems to appeal more to the unintellectual. So is it that music is the outcome of the intellect of the person or that the intellect makes the music.

Shakespeare has more depth and layers in it. It has parallel structure and sylloloquies and extended metaphors. Shakespeare allows someone to read a page and then analyze the page to give away a deeper meaning. Then there is Harry Potter who is more shallow and what you read is all there is to it. This appeals to a lower crowd in literature.

This is more about taste than anything else. You could argue that the difference is that the vernacular is changed so that it fits the crowd it appeals to. For all we know in 400 years people will be analyzing Harry Potter.

Heres my question. Is the piece written to appeal to an audience or is an audience made around that piece?

There was a book written called The Jungle and it was written to just be a good story about an immigrant I think. Just an average Joe he lives in a meat processing facility. The book missed that audience for the most part and moved onto a Progressive audience who took that book as a sign for change. In that scenario an audience forms around that book.

A lot of instances have a book written for that audience. People will say that it will vary from case to case but I do not want that answer.

Let us look at music now. Fall Out Boy writes what they would view as a rock album or more an emo album yet it is taken as pop. Thus the audience has defined the work. You can have someone like eminem who is writing the album to raise awareness for many issues and that is denoted and everyone takes his work as something else. It seems that the author has some opinion in what he thinks his own art is but the world can change its purpose.

This is all quite postmodern but O well.

Does the audience define the piece or does the piece define the audience?