Objectivity and subjectivity. Art and art-making. Aesthetics and practice. There is a nest of traditional problems concerning whether and to what extent what is important about art is located in works of art themselves, whether the artist and his act of creation, or more broadly the manner and circumstances in which the work came about, come into play, and in what ways they do. Some of these problems are discussed under the rubric of the 'intentional fallacy', but the issues are much larger than that of the relevance of artists' intentions.
Contrary views take many forms.
Some have regarded art as essentially a matter of communication between the artist and appreciators, with the work serving as a vehicle of such communication. The appreciator's primary interest is in the person who made the work, in something like what he meant by it, rather than in properties of the work itself. According to Richard Wolheim, the task of the critic is to reconstruct the artist's creative process as it appears in the work. Nietzsche, Benedetto Croce and R. G. Collingwood emphasized the artists' creative act rather than the product of his action but did not think of it especially as an act of communicating with appreciators. Communication may involve such conventions, but in some views what an appreciator is primarily interested in is what the work itself means, given the relevant conventions, rather than what the artist meant by it or communicated by means of it.