two

notes on Milwaukee news sites

OnMilwaukee
https://onmilwaukee.com/

• Categories are articles, events, neighborhoods, places, guides, shopping, partners, and weekend preview
• Focus on the fun things to do in the city and restaurants
• They also have a section towards the bottom called “today’s featured events” that has a list of things happening around Milwaukee that day with a brief description of place and time. 
• Everything is clickable and easy to navigate
• Imagery is similar to newspaper images 
• Video content as well

Journal Sentinel
https://www.jsonline.com/

• Much more politics and news stories 
• Categories are news, sports, business, communities, watchdog, entertainment, nation, obits, and more
• Focus on politics and news stories are heavy 
• Less fluff
• Site is easy to navigate
• Not much video content
• Ad heavy

Shepherd Express
https://shepherdexpress.com/

• Categories are news, food. Music, hemp, arts and entertainment, LGBTQ, advice, sports, film, and events
• Left leaning 
• Focus on local news impacting Milwaukee and community events equally
• Trending topics right below categories with featured stories 
• Image heavy
• Ads are for their own events they put on

Milwaukee Magazine
https://www.milwaukeemag.com/

• Categories are dining + drink, news + city life, culture, lifestyle, best of MKE, things to do, magazine, and faces of milwaukee
• Seems like the cool older sister of OnMilwaukee
• Their graphic design, photography, and layouts are better than the other news websites 
• Not very ad heavy
• Focus on weekly community events and promotions

Milwaukee Record
https://milwaukeerecord.com/

• Badly designed
• Categories are home, music, city life, food/drink, comedy, film, arts, sports, podcast, shop, and calendar
• Imagery is only sponsored ads
• Articles don’t seem particularly interesting 
• One nice feature is that it had a little calendar at the bottom of the bigger upcoming events this week
• Seems to appeal to older demographic- events listed are a lot of throwback 70s music reunions

Principles for Interpreting Art

Dog·mat·ic- adj. inclined to lay down principles as incontrovertibly true.
principles:

• Artworks are always about something.
  Goodman values works of artists as well as the contributions of scientists because both science and art present us with views of the world that provide us with powerful insights, valuable information, and new knowledge. However, art provides insights, information, and knowledge only if we interpret works of art.
  
• Subject matter + Medium + Form + Context = Meaning 
  

Recognizable things +material+composition+environment=interpretation

• To interpret a work of art is to understand it in language
  

To make sense of our responses. By telling or writing what we see and feel and think and do when looking at art, we build a clearer understanding of it. 

• Feelings are guides to interpretation. 
  

“Emotion in aesthetic experience is a means of discerning what properties a work has and expresses.” 

• The critical activities of describing, analyzing, interpreting, judging, and theorizing about works of art are interrelated and interdependent. 
  

Describing- telling what one sees
Interpreting- telling what you think it means
Judging- telling how good you think it is
theorizing- telling what counts as art
Analyzing- telling formal characteristics about the art

• Artworks attract multiple interpretations and it is not the goal of interpretation to arrive at single, grand, unified, composite interpretations. 
  

There is no single, right interpretation for art. "an interpretation is true if it deals with a meaning the work will sustain; where there are many such meanings, there can be many true interpretations.” 

• There is a range of interpretations any artwork will allow. 
  

Fear of over-interpretation- reading too much into art. “History and culture limit the range of interpretations that are allowable. To interpret a work from a time and place other than our own, we must first recognize and acknowledge that it is of another time and from another place.”

• Meanings of artworks are not limited to what their artists intended them to mean.
  

All art is open to interpretation and often the artists themselves can help us understand things about their work we can’t find from other sources. 

• Interpretations are not so much right, but are more or less reasonable, convincing, informative, and enlightening. 
  

No wrong answers, but some interpretations can be unpersuasive, redundant, far-fetched, obvious, fragmented, or boring. 

• Interpretations imply a worldview. 
  

“We all move through the world with a more or less articulated set of assumptions about existence, and it is through these that we interpret everything, including works of art.” everyone moves through the world differently and everyone who interprets brings a unique perspective to the table based on where they have been and what they have seen.

• Good interpretations tell more about the artwork than they tell about the interpreter. 
  

It is the critics task to relate the personal information being offered to the artwork being interpreted so the general public understands the work not just the interpreter. 

• The objects of interpretation are artworks, not artists. 
  

The art in question is meant to be interpreted, not the artist and their life based on background knowledge. 

• All art is in part about the world in which it emerged. 
  

“There is no way out from seeing art as a reflection or meditation or a comment on life.”

• All art is in part about other art. 
  

Art is a public practice and can only succeed publicly. In order for the viewer to understand it they need a basic framework of art it was inspired by, medium, and technology, among other things

• Good interpretations have coherence, correspondence, and inclusiveness.
  

Three criteria:
Coherence-does it make sense in itself and apart from the work? 
Correspondence- does it interpretation match with what is being seen? 
Inclusiveness-does it account for what is in the work and the environment that the work is in?

• Interpreting art is an endeavor that is both individual and communal. 
  

Has both meaning to one and one’s life, and is also a shared interpretation with communal understanding 

• Some interpretations are better than others. 
  

 “many matters of art are matters of opinion but go on to assert that statements about works of art can be more than mere opinions, they can be informed opinions.” 

• The admissibility of an interpretation is ultimately determined by a community of interpreters and the community is self-correcting. 
  

“an optimistic view of the art world and scholarship that holds that artists, critics, historians, and other serious interpreters will eventually correct less-than-adequate interpretations and will eventually put forth better interpretations”

• Good interpretations invite us to see for ourselves and continue on our own. 
  

We might not have picked up on some elements or meaning of a piece of work on our own and that makes quality interpretations useful