branching out in the blogging world- author function

I found this blog about the new movie “300” and the idea of the author function. I found it interesting because it tied into my personal life. My father wanted to see this movie very badly but my mother refused because she heard that it had had the same director who did Dawn of the Dead in 2004, which my father watched as well. She immediately thought both films were too violent for her and did not go see it. She is doing what we talked about, associating the piece art with the author. She can not get away from tying the author to their work. And in the other sense neither can my dad because his reasons for wanting to see “300” were the fact that it had the reputation to be violent and action packed.
This blog also discusses Foucault and Barthes. He writes, “As Barthes wrote, “the author is a modern figure, a product of our society insofar as, emerging from the Middle Ages with English empiricism, French rationalism, and the personal faith of the Reformation, it discovered the prestige of the individual, of, as it is more nobly put, the ‘human person’”(DA 143). Basically, modern society ties text to the author.” I feel that this is true. We as a society strive to know who wrote anything that we read and consider work. We even need to know the author in things outside of text such as music, paintings etc. As we read in Foucault and the blogger points out that in earlier times if a piece of work had an anonymous author we did not view it as true. We even then needed to tie the author with their work to make it have any meaning.
He then discusses what Barthes says about what happens once the author is gone; “ […]the single meaning of the text attributed to the Author (what Barthes called the theological meaning, since it is unitary and absolute), is replaced by a multiplicity of meanings, which depends on the reading. In another essay in Image-Music-Text, From Work to Text, Barthes claims that the reader gives the text its meaning, not the Author.” He talks about this in relation to critics. He uses critic’s comments on the movie “300” in the beginning of his blog and then talks about how irrelevant they are based on this idea. Since the reader is giving the meaning there are multiple meanings that one can come to. If there are multiple meanings the blogger says that there is nothing to criticize because it is a decentered text. I have a question about this though….is not a critic a reader as well? I feel that the critic can come up with an opinion because they are a reader who gives meaning to the text.