Pull a Heinrich

The Deconstruction of Art. My mother and I started discussing one of my paintings. It's a painting of a japanese crane. I brought up the point of signifiers and signifieds - that I did not paint a picture with the real bird standing right in front of me. I painted a picture of an internet print out of an alleged photograph of the real thing, posted on the internet by an unknown source. Then we started discussing hypothetical situations in which the person who possibly photoshopped the bird from scratch created it without ever seeing any sort of image or representation of that type of bird in their lifetime, and thought they created a new type of bird, when in reality they didn't. Then the question came up of whether or not that photoshopped picture actually is a signifier to the signified, or is it not because that was not the creator's intention, because he/she didn't know the signified even existed? This brought us to color. We both looked at my painting of the bird and called the chemical mix that represented most of the bird "white". But the thing is, every person perceives such chemical mixes differently, even though we call them the same thing. It's just the way our brains and eyes work. Each person sees "white", but what they call "white" could very easily be what someone else would call "red", but they only call it white because that's how they were trained as a child. Our parents point to the chemical mix plastered on a piece of paper and say "this is red", so we call whatever we see that they're pointing at, red. So, to help clarify, lets say I were able to take my own consciousness, and put it into my mother's brain and eyes. I might look at what she and I both called "white" but, seeing it through her eyes and brain's perception, my consciousness might say, "wow, I would totally call that pale yellow". But she calls it white because she was told it was white. So that's how that aspect of signifiers and signifieds came about. Then I began to wonder what the true reality of color is. Since each and every person has a different perception of color, then that means there isn't anyone with a truly objective ability to tell us what each color really is. So, is there such thing as a true reality of color? I mean if they're all just refraction of light from the different mixes of chemicals, does color really exist outside our own perceptions? Because if there's no light, there's no color. So, my mother's reaction to all this was, and I quote, "well, I can't wait for you to go to college, so I don't have to listen the postmodern talk in my house anymore. I have postmodern stress disorder!"