Granted

Question

I know the usual meaning of "granted" which is usually followed by "but", but I can not understand its meaning in the following context. Does it make any difference in the meaning if I ignore it below?

Context:

... Anne Wagner’s insistence that Hesse’s ‘practices of both drawing and sculpture may have been in some definitive sense the products of unconscious processes – and as such among the means she used to come to terms with the loss of her mother’. Granted Wagner does situate this unconscious content as being screened or propped behind strictly artistic concerns and that it is the latter which allow the viewer access to the psychic charge of the work rather than knowledge of the artist’s biography. Art is a metaphorical and material working over of and through bodily feelings, so that while the work relates to Hesse’s feelings of being a body in space and time, these feelings are transformed by the formal language available to her, to which she brings an awareness of the intimate qualities of materials, their translucency and opacity.

Anonymous · Accepted Answer

I've decided that this is not a very good writer. You can't shoot from the hip in formal, abstruse criticism. Interesting stuff, but clumsily rendered.

I would have put a comma after "granted", and so would most of us, I imagine. That "granted" is made to extend out to "and that it is the latter", so we can't ignore it. If we could ignore it, "does" makes "granted" redundant given the meaning the writer was trying for, that although Wagner exposes Hesse's unconscious content, Wagner also admits that Hesse cloaks it in enough technique to be art. Or something like that.

"Propped behind" is backwards. The artistic concerns are propped up in front of the unconscious content. To use "the latter", there has to be a former, and I had to go on safari for both. Jeeze.

Granted

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