Since Francisco Goya first released his collection of 80 stone engravings entitles los Caprichos in 1799, they have remained a topic of curiosity and debate. Overwhelmingly, the expert interpretations available examine los Caprichos strictly in terms of the external circumstances in which it was created – the political climate of 18th century Spain, the rise of the Enlightenment period, the deteriorating mental health of the artist. The research being presented here will propose a different methodology in approaching and understanding Goya’s work that emphasizes the role the spectator has in creating meaning. By encouraging the audience to interact individually with the internal components of the artwork, as opposed to restricting it to a predetermined lens of historical context, novel interpretations of long-established work are able to develop. As part of this research, the contemporary art perspective of Monster Theory was applied to los Caprichos in order to create an example of how the spectator-driven-meaning methodology could be enacted. This hypothetical application garnered a variety of interpretations unique to the spectator that emphasized internal, aesthetic ambiguities.
