User:Arthur goes shopping/Creative people and their works

The extent to which a Wikipedia article should discuss a creative person's works varies widely. For individuals like Banksy and Homer, their works (and others' treatment of them) are the main material of interest, while coverage of them as persons is largely based only on speculation. At the opposite extreme, we know a great deal about the personal life, background, social milieu, trial and death of Socrates, but we have almost no independent reliable evidence about what his teachings actually were. Somewhere between these two extremes are individuals such as Van Gogh, about whom we have comprehensive information both about the events of his life and about his works. Regardless of these variations in available material, an article about an artist should attempt to convey what is provided by reliable sources both about the person and their life, and also their works. After all, the artist is notable (in Wikipedia's terms) for their works - we would not have an article about the musical artist Gary Glitter if he had never produced any music.

Looking again at the material that you've removed, they appear to be very closely paraphrased versions of what is on Fried's own website. I can only assume that material was originally written by Fried or someone associated with him, perhaps from the promotional or introductory material for each exhibition. While this is useful both in providing basic facts about each work (that one installation consists of different metal spheres, for example), and about the artist's stated intentions with each work, the level of material is really not appropriate for Wikipedia. Wikipedia should not be reproducing all (or even most) of what an artist says about their own works on their own website. In particular, statements telling us what impact or reaction a work produces in the viewer should not come from the creator of the work or the gallery showing the work, but instead should come from independent sources like, for example, a newspaper art critic who has viewed the work in the gallery and then written about their own reaction to it, or the reactions they observed in others. Art critics may also have negative opinions about the effectiveness of a work, whereas we would not expect to find such commentary on the artist's own website. So overall no, I do not feel there is any benefit in arranging for this type of material to be added to the Wikipedia article. Arthur goes shopping (talk) 09:08, 4 October 2013 (UTC)