Within this misperception, artistic constructions are considered immune to the myriad of external factors which inform all non-artistic human constructions. However, art is not created, nor does it exist in a vacuum. The relationship between artist and work is not analogous to that of God and Creation or of Form and representation. Artists and their works are subject to networks of conceptual and physical structures which define the phenomenal world. Art, like all other human creations, is human artifact.
Art then exists in the dialectic space created by two conflicting tendencies.
One is the artist's desire to grapple for unattainable God-like authority over an artistic work. The other is the tendency of a chaotic and fragmented reality to frustrate all attempts to construct in an orderly and sensible fashion. Fellini's cinema addresses the dual obligations created by an awareness of this dialectic. Also, it embodies the manner in which this dialectic, which is the centerpiece of Western aesthetics, is in a widely unacknowledged sense an oblique discourse on gender and sexuality. Fellini makes no attempt to mask the manner in which aesthetic and gender discourses operate with intermingled symbolic currencies.