When we experience art, we never experience it completely, just the parts of it we notice and that we engage with – merely a slice, and often a narrow one, of the whole. This is why we have so many enthusiastic consumers of overtly political art decrying the presence of politics in art, never noticing a contradiction. It’s easy to be contemptuous of those who ‘miss the point’, but seldom do any of us entirely get the point – even the creator usually has blind spots, and often accidentally ends up implying things they never meant to say or omitting things that might have added clarity. Even something very straightforward can be misinterpreted – or alternately interpreted, or malinterpreted, reinterpreted, deinterpreted. We can enjoy watching the same film or reading the same novel over and over again because each time this slice of interpretation is slightly different – and at no point is it complete. As these interpretations are context dependent, we’ll never be able to encompass all of them as individuals, but we can discuss the work to further our understand of, not just the work itself, but the many ways it can be viewed, the many ways it can be experienced.
This is not to make excuses for those who miss extremely overt themes and elements of works they love – and who often have very motivated reasoning to do so – but just to say that, to greater or lesser degree, this is something we all do. All interpretation of art is fragmented. All understanding is incomplete.
For every art there is a set of sub-arts, of interpretations – a set of viewings, each a distinct perspective. Depending on what mindset you approach a work with, the interpretation you come away with will be different. For instance, if you approach a work through a critical lens, a lens which examines its flaws and themes in much the same way as you would if you were constructing the work yourself, you will come away with a very different understanding than if you just approach it as a consumer who’s there for the ride. However, because the critical lens is in many ways similar to the creator’s lens, as the culture of creation shifts so does the culture of criticism.
After my reviews last week, I had a discussion about how it seemed like there was a cultural change in the way things were criticized, that they were evaluated more politically than before – my initial response to this was to essentially say that politics that you’ve internalized tend to be invisible, so things were still, in the past, being judged through a political lens but without the acknowledgement of those politics. However, I think something else has shifted apart from but related to these mores: I think that artists now are much more concerned with how to make the world an, if not a better place, than at least one no worse than it was before they created, and that this mindset of “first do no harm” extends to the critical mindset as well.
Once you accept the premise that art can do good you accept the premise that art can do harm. Thus, one of the criteria on which we evaluate art should be, as it is when we evaluate almost everything else in existence, whether it does more good than harm. Of course, this is impossible to know – because everyone has a different experience with and interpretation of a work, it also impacts them in completely different ways. Thus the overall impact of art is distant and unpredictable, and even the most admirable of works can have unfortunate side effects, and even the most vile garbage can have beneficial effects. You can’t treat art as a moral act in the same way you would treat passing legislation – but can you treat it the same way as you would giving a speech, a form of art itself? How overt do the messages of art need to be before it becomes equivalent to a piece of purely argumentative prose, a force of pure rhetoric? Propaganda is real, but how do you measure its effects in an environment when everyone’s interpretations can be so radically different?
You probably can’t. For every interpretation of art as anodyne or incendiary, there’s another interpretation, albeit perhaps a much rarer one, that sees the opposite. This collaborative work of interpretation is part of what makes art so powerful – the ideas that are imparted are as much your own as the creator’s, an act of collaboration potentially covering vast distances of time and space, divides of class and culture. The feature is also a bug, and the message so important that the artist dedicated a chunk of their life to craft a work around it can be wholly lost, twisted, undermined.