"Crested Butte": Criticizing art and culture

Contemporary art is the product of culturally significant behavior. How do we interpret this behavior of artists as meaningful? How can its interpretation be used as a source of information about the cultures we share with the artist?; I took one particular case, a painting titled Crested Butte by Lee Haner, and described my own actions as a member of the artist's interpretive community. My methods were adapted from those used in the analysis of text and discourse by practitioners in the fields of Anthropological Linguistics, Linguistic Pragmatics, and the Philosophy of Language. I found interpreters of contemporary art are engaged in reflexive processes of cultural criticism. We construct our interpretations just as we construct our cultures. We examine our own ideas, beliefs, and values and then negotiate with each other, engaging in dialogues that determine what our cultures will be, what we will transmit to future generations and what we will change.