Okay, bearing in mind that I know nothing about art, visual or otherwise (nor about the course you’re doing) I can give you some pointers towards thinking about, understanding and organising an answer that might key into the way you’ve looked at art…
Firstly, the obvious thing to do is consider whatever form of art you’re talking about as a “text” in the abstract - something that has been created (it has “an author”) and which is read “by someone”.
Considering art in this way leads to the development of a number of questions:
Who owns this work - the author, as creator, or the reader as interpreter? This begins to suggest questions of social inequality that I’m sure you can start to develop.
Wider questions of social inequality (based around say Foucault’s concept of power) involve thinking not just about who “owns” art, per se, but also who has the power to create “art”, in the sense of who decides what is or what is not “art” (in simple terms, why does Picasso’s art sell for millions and my art isn’t work the paper it’s drawn on?)
Next you can consider questions of meaning in this dual way - who decides the meaning of a text (the author or the audience?) and who decides the meaning of art (when is a text considered “art” and when is it considered something else - whatever that something may be)?
This. In turn, leads to deeper questions of meaning - does a text only have a single, authoritative, meaning (and who gives it that meaning / owns that meaning)? Or does art have different meanings for different audiences / interpreters?
This can lead to a consideration of the power structures on which texts are based - if there is a single, authoritative, (essentialist) meaning to a text this suggests something about social order - that it is based (founded) on a certain structure which both gives authoritative meaning and which, in turn, is reflected in that meaning.
If, on the other hand, we reject the idea of authoritative meaning then we enter into a social constructionist realm where what we perceive as “the social order” is actually constructed around a wide range of fragmented meanings all struggling to be heard.
Thus, a central feature of a constructivist position is that ‘reality’ is defined from the position of different social groups and we need to think, therefore, in terms of ‘multiple realities’ rather than a single ‘reality’. Although this still involves a concept of ‘society’ (or art or whatever), in the sense that structural relationships (such as socialisation processes) affect individual behaviour, it is a different conception to that held by essentialists and means we need to understand how individuals construct realities that then reflect back on their behaviour.
If this is unclear, think about ‘society’ (defined in terms of the structure of our social relationships) as being like the author of a book. The author constructs a reality (a story or narrative) we enter as we read. However, whatever the ultimate intentions of the author, each reader interprets the narrative in different ways, some of which are intended by the author but many of which are different for each reader. Thus, when Barthes (1968) talks about ‘the death of the author’, he’s suggesting there is no single author of a text because each reader reconstructs it in different ways through the meanings they give to the narrative. As he puts it: ‘The death of the author is the birth of the reader.’
If we think of this in terms of the relationship between ‘society’ and the ‘individual’, the former is not ‘the author’ of the latter – people are not simply blank pages on which the author (society) writes and creates social order. On the contrary, from a constructionist (subjectivist) position it is ‘society’ that is the book (something that has a particular historical structure) and people who are the authors of their own narratives or, to paraphrase Keep et al. (2000): ‘The author (“society”) is not simply a ‘person’ (“thing”) but a socially and historically constituted subject.’
If you think about this in terms of art (rather than society) you should be able to develop a way of approaching the question you’ve been set.
This should at least get you started (thinking about how to approach this question in a way that, I trust, is similar to how you’ve been encouraged to approach artistic concepts) and if you need more detailed exposition let me know (things can get a lot deeper than the above if you need to get into debates about structuralism / poststructuralism and I can give you info. / references for further ideas).