Interpretation of Art

[@ivan55599]

As an artist l find myself thinking "Well, l can put this thing on there, just for trolling people, who try to find some sort of deep meaning." Unless l state clearly what l mean, by describing in separate description paper.

[@KaneB]

I think some people, especially people in academia, underestimate just how powerful a motivation "I did it for the lulz" can be.

[@Megaritz]

Here’s one minor problem I have with anti-intentionalism, or at least with some possible rationales for anti-intentionalism. To some extent, anti-intentionalism seems motivated by a skepticism of the relevance of artwork-external facts, and a desire to *only* take into account artwork-internal facts-i.e. features internal to the artwork itself, as opposed to facts which exist outside of it. However, most forms of anti-intentionalism DO take into account the “artistic conventions” in interpreting what the artwork means. Indeed, we must appeal to “artistic conventions” in order to even discern *what* the *internal* features of the artwork are. But the artistic conventions sure look a lot like artwork-external facts-facts about the broader culture which produced the artwork, facts about language, etc. But then, once we allow external cultural facts to factor into the meaning of the artwork, then I’m not sure how we can in principle exclude facts about the biography of the author-including the author’s intentions.

[@RocketKirchner]

As a professional musician and songwriter we really ourselves can’t be objective . So how can others ? Where the game is played isn’t about motive as Aristotle says but rather the mystic power of the art itself

[@Megaritz]

I notice that there has been no attempt here to define or characterize “meaning,” which seems a huge missed step. Of course, we should be careful not to define “meaning” in a question-begging way that presupposes one of the theories under investigation. But I’m inclined to define it in the following (hopefully practical and non-circular) way: “Meaning” is roughly equivalent to “whatever it is that we’re looking for when we do art interpretation.” If we accept this meta-level view of meaning, then I think it provides some guidance in evaluating the three first-order views of meaning you’ve put forward, regarding meaning’s relation to artist’s intention. I’ll briefly defend my meta-theory, then briefly discuss how it justifies a first-order pluralist theory of meaning. (Note: I have very little background in philosophy of art or aesthetics, and only a vague recollection of occasional discussion of literary theory in a few undergrad classes from years ago. I’ve been very slowly cobbling together my art theory for many years-but without a lot of sustained effort, nor research, nor confidence in its correctness. Still, here’s what I’ve got offhand.) First, my theory seems faithful to how we obtain the concept of meaning, and why we are interested in it. We don’t come out of a box with the notion of artistic meaning. We arrive at the notion of artistic meaning through the act of thoughtful engagement with artworks, of many kinds. My view is metaphysically modest, not going too far beyond the observable facts without good reason. I think there are various facts, such as (1) the facts about what the author intended, and (2) the facts about the artistic conventions (of the author’s culture and/or the reader’s culture), and (3) the facts about how the artwork affects any given reader, and similar thin descriptive facts of these sorts (as well as possibly various normative facts). But I have seen no reason to believe that any aggregation of these sorts of facts grounds some *further* (second-order, normative or quasi-normative, etc.) fact about THE “meaning.” In order to show that there is a single “meaning” in some further sense, especially a unified sense (as contrasted against my pluralism below), I think you’d need to provide something like a compelling broader theory which features “meaning” in some unified sense, or in which some single concept “meaning” is necessary or helpful to explaining some phenomena-which hasn’t been done here, and which I haven't seen. My view helps explain why there is so much disagreement about meaning, e.g. between intentionalists and various schools of anti-intentionalists such as New Critics, Reader-Response critics, whatever view Barthes meant by “death of the author,” and so on. It is because different readers/viewers are interested in different kinds of interpretation, and end up talking past each other. (Note, this kind of argument can go too far. Not all philosophical disputes involve disputants talking past each other. I think it is plausible here, however.) One may worry my view gets the order of explanation backwards, between meaning and interpretation. If interpretation is grounded by meaning, then is my view problematically interpretation-first? I can’t readily elaborate on this, but I think my view isn't committed to a problematic order of explanation. One may also defend a unified sense of artistic meaning by analogy to a unified sense of linguistic meaning-there’s a single truth to what (say) a sentence means. Similarly, there may be a single truth to what (say) a movie or book, qua an artwork, means. However, I think this analogy fails. It is not at all obvious that artworks (as whole entities) are the same kind of thing, with the same kind of meaning, as an individual sentence. The fact that artworks are (usually) co-constituted by sentences doesn’t clearly change this, either. Sentences have features such as syntax which are more-or-less formal a lot of the time, and are co-constituted by words that often have referents, and the sentences as a whole are often truth-apt. These and other aspects of sentences arguably don’t have any close parallel when it comes to artworks. (We may think an artwork is “true” in some symbolic way, or has a true or false “message,” but this is not obviously analogous to the truth-aptness of a sentence.) There is a widespread tendency to speak of the “meaning” of an artwork such that there’s an implicit analogy to the “meaning” of sentences. I think this analogy is likely very misleading on many levels. Here my thoughts are at least similar to your challenges to the art-conversation analogy. In any case, my meta-level theory of artistic meaning provides me with some argument for first-order artistic meaning pluralism, against (but somewhat encompassing) the three monistic theories you proposed. First, we can do forms of art interpretation that seek the author’s intentions. Second, we can do forms of art interpretation that seek some combination of the author’s intentions and other facts. Third, we can do forms of art interpretation that are flat-out uninterested in (or even hostile to) discovering the artist’s intentions. The fact that we can do all three kinds of interpretation is evidence that there are three or more kinds of meaning, i.e. meaning pluralism. Relatedly, often there are several kinds of “meaning” being conflated under a single label. For instance, the question of whether “Deckard is a replicant” is a dispute over what happens in a given film. But in discussing an artwork’s “meaning,” we also frequently mean something more like its “message,” e.g. what Blade Runner “has to say” about modern society or technology (or whatever else). And I’m pretty sure there are many more things that are denoted by an artwork’s “meaning” beyond these two things, as well. Although this does not directly support my pluralist theory, it does count slightly against the notion that artistic “meaning” has a single unified concept. However, a broad nuanced theory may be able to relate these different kinds or senses of “meaning” under one framework (which some art theorists have indeed done), so this is not a decisive argument. One may think my view is too subjectivist, since I ground it in our actual practices of interpretation. But surely we can do a bad job of interpreting an artwork, or we can engage in modes of interpretation that are worthless or bad. One might think the “meaning” of an artwork is what grounds the fact that we are interpreting the artwork badly or wrongly, i.e. when we get the meaning wrong. However, I think my view can accommodate this and is not excessively subjectivist. If we’re interested in interpreting the artwork in light of the artist’s intentions or the artistic conventions (of our culture, or of the artist’s culture, etc.), and we have false beliefs about the artist’s intentions or the artistic conventions, then our interpretations (in these respects) will be objectively mistaken, and we will arrive at false ideas about the artwork’s meaning(s). However, this is compatible with it being up to us whether to be interested or uninterested in interpreting the artwork in light of objective facts such as the artist’s intentions or some set of artistic conventions. If we’re uninterested in these facts, and we instead choose to interpret the artwork in some other way altogether, then we aren't necessarily making a mistake. Relatedly, some forms of artistic interpretation may also be objectively more valuable than others. However, this is a question of value, not a question of correctness. The fact that I might engage in a less-valuable form of artistic interpretation may suggest that I am discerning a less-valuable kind of artistic meaning-not that I am failing to discern an artistic meaning in the first place. So the option is open for (say) someone with intentionalist sympathies to concede that some non-intentionalist ways of artistic interpretation are accurate routes to meaning, but deny that they are valuable (or vice versa).

[@KaneB]

Yes. The decision not to attempt to define "meaning" was an intentionally missed step. It would have required a whole other video to deal with that properly... and this video might well appear at some point, if I get the desire to do more on philosophy of art. For what it's worth though, I have a lot of sympathy for the kind of deflationary view of artistic meaning you outline there. Indeed, I wonder if talk about "meanings" here is liable to be misleading. In the context of language, "meaning" refers to the semantic content of utterances, and with that in mind, talk about the meanings of artworks perhaps inclines us to view art as a kind of extension of language. Which is fair enough, insofar as language and art are forms of communication. But there is also "meaning" in the sense of the point or significance of something, as when people worry about "the meaning of life." These different senses of "meaning" have little in common, but I suspect that when we ask about the meaning of an artwork, we may be equivocating between these two senses, or even between metaphorical extensions of each of these two senses. It's also worth noting that, when we engage in art interpretation, we need not frame it in terms of meaning at all. It's not obvious that the question "is Rick Deckard a replicant?" is a question about the meaning of (some aspect of) Blade Runner. At least, it's not obvious that I have to think of it in those terms.

[@Megaritz]

@@KaneB I think I agree with all that. Thanks for the reply!

[@veganphilosopher1975]

Amazed by both the breadth and depth of topics covered on this channel. Question: how do you prepare for these videos? Do you tend to focus on a particular topic for a short time or do you have all these topics lingering in your mind for a while before making the video?

[@Bubba17644]

Hm, what about adopting particularism toward the meaning of artworks? I mean sure, some private evidence is very likely crucial for us to properly understand the meaning of e.g. some works that might controversially be considered satires, but not necessary at all when it comes to other artworks. Why not adopt this methodological attitude instead of a generalist one? Great video as always!

[@Nx2.1]

Well they lay down beside me, I made my confession to them They touched both my eyes and I touched the dew on their hem If your life is a leaf that the seasons tear off and condemn They will bind you with love that is graceful and green as a stem.

[@unstablepc5913]

The way hypothetical intentionalism is stated here reminds me of bayesian statistics

[@rogerwitte]

I think there is an additional aspect, namely the intended audience (especially if the intended audience is from long ago or far away). Consider Byzantine icons - clearly the intended audience are Orthodox Christians. The fact that it doesn't communicate the same thin gto me, an Ashkenazi jew should be irrelevant to whether the artist suceeded in their efforts.

[@jackcascione6137]

Hi Kane B I have listened to many of your videos for the past five years or longer while I’m painting in my garage in Marana AZ. I worked as an art professor at the University of Southern Indiana, participated in art shows, sold numerous works, and have a show coming up in Scottsdale AZ. You are out of your field on art interpretation. Of course, the artists’ intensions are important, but people look at art, not intensions. There are three works of art, the one intended by the artist, the one that is completed, and the one the public thinks it sees. When I stand behind people and listen to their comments about my work, I’m always amazed how they see things I never planned or thought about.

[@cynicviper]

Good day to you Dr. Baker.

[@silverharloe]

plot twist: forgery. And not just a duplicate of a painting, but at least one person has tried to make a painting so carefully mimicing a famous artist's style that they could sell it as a "lost" painting they "discovered"

[@petrospetroupetrou9653]

The philosopher Dickie considers art any thing that is placed within the artworld, or declared as art (e.g. a gallery, forum). Within the artworld all objects are interpreted differently.

[@iamdigory]

An artwork means what a reasonable person in the intended target audience could reasonably infer from consuming the art in the intended way. This applies to any communicative act not just "art" whatever that is.

[@tudornaconecinii3609]

36:00 can't we make the case that failed irony is a meaningfully semantically different category from both ironic works and non-ironic works?

[@Wherrimy]

My general views are very antagonistic towards the search for meaning in art as a whole. You see, if you want to express a specific viewpoint, you should do so clearly and openly using language. It's not perfect, but it's the best thing we have for this task. Art is good at conveying other things, namely, feelings and impressions. Trying to use it to communicate meaning is like using some obscure half-broken cipher. The inherent ambiguousness and subjectivity would inevitably lead you to create your own meaning that you *think* the author has intended, and noone will be able to prove you wrong. In fact, artists specifically place ambiguous details (like the mentioned blade runner case) in the works, without any concrete vision, simply because it provokes more discussion and creates the pretense of some deeper meaning. But this is just a trick.

[@russellsteapot8779]

Great video! If an artist creates with the express intention for the work to be anti-intentional (maybe dadaism, or some of Bowie's lyrics from the seventies), would that have a foot in both camps, like some sort of artistic dialetheism?

[@italogiardina8183]

Intentionalism and archetypal theory arose directly from Jung's self -analysis and from his work with mainly psychotic patients in the Burgholzli Hospital. He found that imagery fell into patterns, that these patterns were not originate in perceptions , memory or conscious experience. The images seemed to Jung to reflect universal human modes of experience and behaviour. In a sense Jung is a intentional collectivist, as Jung also satisfied himself that no theory of migration could explain the ubiquity of certain cultural motifs, and he concluded that there is a part of the psyche held in common and he called this the collective unconscious. To universality and collectivity must be added two further factors-depth and autonomy. The primordial images are like foundations; subsequent imagery is derived from them. So from a Jungian perspective artist intensions are dreams that push into social realism which is political economy set within a historical materialism. Although Jung is at heart a Hegelian with a strong foundation in the universal evolution of the spirit qua archetypes it seems Jung also draws on historical materialism where primordial images have a certain independence, can pop up in the mind without warning like in a dream, daydream, fantasy or artistic creation, such images are rationalised through 'irrepresentable' basic form. So whatever the intension may be claimed its anchored to an archetype or basic form. This form ostensible correlates to a human form. So Jungian analysis may be a form of strong intentionalism where a person has emergent properties that can only be situated rather than have collective properties of a culture. This seems to place Jung in a neo Platonism tradition where as art historians tend to sit firmly in the Aristotelian tradition. It could be observed that Indi artists or the outsider artist would find solace in Jung's interpretation for it governs success in ones artistic pursuits as an intra personal set of events rather than an inter personal set of events. So in this sense artworks qua meaning are site specific and once transported to a gallery become meaningless commercial objects. This becomes a bit of an issue for galleries whose interests are to correlate value (economic dollar value) to intrinsic meaning which can be achieved through Aristotelian intentionalism as a variant of moderate intentionalism. Anti intentionalism suits authoritarian states where power is centralised to a cohort of agents who claim to be impersonal as mere instruments of the collective. The power is extracted from any local authority to give intentional meaning value to the artefact. The Orwellian state is the prime example of anti intentionalism for artistic meaning value where all images have a job to function as ideological stalwarts of reproducing a status quo. This suggests that a lot of hospitals for 'psychotic patients' who claim to have intentions and meaning imbued in their artwork if the state opts for anti intentionalism. It is a win therefor for mass consumerism as the consumer can purchase an item like a miniature guitar produced in the developing world as a token of wealth akin to purchasing a luxury brand. The meaning detaches from any person and is embedded in a form of wealth status where the person is situated along side their close others as peer. The evidence for this can be found in local interest groups like a motorcycle association where to keep up a member need to purchase the latest luxury motorcycle to go on a weekend joy ride. So on this account anti intentionalism serves the world political system of international trade whereas moderate intentionalism serves local nativists and strong intentionalism serves marginal outliers who happen to hold sentiments of extreme individual which from the fragmentation of libertarian ideals and the enlightenment.

[@Megaritz]

Many forms of intentionalism existed long before Jung's work, so it did not originally arise from his work. But of course, Jung's work influenced a lot of subsequent art & literary theory, and hence he influenced many later forms of both intentionalism and anti-intentionalism.

[@italogiardina8183]

@@Megaritz Indeed, Aristotle offers an account of an account of a development leading to the grasp of archaic, and gives a name, nous, of the power of grasping them. However Jung or more so the post Jungians developed a theory of cultural constructions as autonomous forces or emergent mental processes as property dualism.

[@silverharloe]

31:41 if we say there's no fact of the matter as to whether or not Deckard is a replicant, are we not confirming or at least agreeing with the script writer who said he wanted it ambiguous?

[@KaneB]

There would be no fact of the matter whether or not it's ambiguous. It's a higher-level "no fact of the matter"! That is, an artist might intend that it be unclear whether Deckard is a replicant. We might say that they succeed at this, or that they fail at this, or that there is no fact of the matter whether they succeed or fail at this.

[@silverharloe]

One problem I find with complete anti-intentionalism is that if I interpret Blade Runner as a 2 hour presentation about how tasty potatoes are, there seems to be no way to say that I'm wrong.

[@pookz3067]

If someone legitimately has that interpretation, there has to be some it interaction with their mind that produced that interpretation, and so I doubt it could be wrong. The reason your example seems so strange is that probably no one ever could have that interpretation. Human minds are mostly pretty similar, the number of possible interpretations can be functionally infinite, but are not completely unconstrained.

[@bigol7169]

Does intentionalism assume that free will exists?

[@KaneB]

No. You can intend to do things regardless of whether those intentions are freely formed.

[@quiensera9947]

I've been avoiding Blade Runner spoilers until I read the book. I guess I waited too long

[@RocketKirchner]

Read Susan Sontags “ Against interpretation “ .

[@nilsqvis4337]

I think one case against strong intentionalism is that art often contains aspects that the artist didn't necessarily intend. As art is often created with processes that rely a great deal on intuition, it can often feature biases, accidents and subconscious stuff.

[@RocketKirchner]

So true . Besides it doesn’t matter about the artist but rather will the work last .

[@Megaritz]

I’m not a strong intentionalist, but it may be possible for strong intentionalism to accommodate some of this. Maybe we can accompany intentionalism with a psychologically thick sense of “intention.” It may be that “intention” can include the artist’s intuitions, even mental states that they are not consciously aware of. The author’s unconscious biases may count as part of their intention, even if they are unaware of them. But this view may be better construed as an “author’s psychology” theory rather than an “author’s intention” theory, since the unconscious biases are obviously part of their psychology but arguably aren’t part of their intention. Moreover, it is controversial whether someone can or can’t be unaware of their own intentions. On the other hand, it is more-or-less widely agreed that someone *can* be unaware of some other mental states, such as desires, and sometimes (not always) we use the word “intention” as roughly synonymous with desire. All that said, packing all these factors into "intention" seems to inflate the concept too much. It's more likely that the meaning is influenced by factors in addition to intention.

[@hasanalharaz7454]

What about the point that if you disregard what their intention was it’s disrespectful? You didn’t say anything about that

[@whycantiremainanonymous8091]

Analytic philosophy is almost a century late to this party. All the ideas discussed here are a third pressing of Continental aesthetics from, at the latest, the 1960s. And the Continental originals were making much more coherent cases for their views (without cramming them into the "isms" you started with, neither of which really makes much sense as a theory of artistic meaning). So, here's a take informed by said originals: 1. Art works are like utterances. Even if they're monologues, they're still communicative acts (if the notion of meaning can be applies to them at all). 2. Reconstructing the author's intentions (and that can be an implied author) is what we're trying to do when we're trying to tease out the meaning of any utterance, artworks included. 3. But the communicative intent behind an utterance is not the same as whatever went through an artist's, or speaker's head. Communicative intent always takes both author and audience into account (Grice's 1957 paper "Meaning" actually does a good job at spelling out at least some aspects of this; one Analytic philosopher, who wasn't late to the party after all). 4. Note also that the contextual evidence that we take as potentially relevant to interpreting a work of art is only such evidence that could conceivably reflect on authorial intent. Ideas that became associated with skulls after Hollbein died, or ones that we know he could not have known about for some other reason, are not considered relevant contextual information (well, unless you're Derrida). 5. An interpretation is best understood as a response by the interpreter to the artwork. As such, it has to be oriented towards the author's intent, but needs not be entirely constrained by it.

[@KaneB]

Did I give the impression that analytic philosophers have only just started talking about this? Because that's not the case. The Wimsatt & Beardsley paper was written in the 40s. You say that none of the "isms" makes sense as a theory of artistic meaning, but what you've written there seems like a straightforward expression of either moderate intentionalism or hypothetical intentionalism (depending on how the notion of "implied author" is elaborated). So I'm a bit puzzled as to what the objection to the "isms" is supposed to be.

[@whycantiremainanonymous8091]

@@KaneB Wimsatt and Beardsley is indeed from long ago (arguing against views that were quite outmoded on the Continent by then, though their extreme position was novel). Other texts not so much. You said they're recent. And no, it's neither kind of intentionalism. Note that the author's intention does not _determine_ meaning. Meaning is _oriented_ toward intent, but not determined by it. You have to reconstruct intent to produce an interpretation, but your reconstruction is not beholden to what went on in anybody's head at any point.

[@KaneB]

@@whycantiremainanonymous8091 Right, there are older papers and more recent papers. So analytic philosophers are late to the party because they continued talking about it? It's not strong intentionalism. It does seem to be either moderate or hypothetical intentionalism, though. Unless your claim is that, although we must reconstruct intent when producing our interpretations, those interpretations need not conform to the intent that we reconstruct. That is, the "final product" can diverge from the intent: I may judge that the art means that p even though the (perhaps implied) author intended that not-p. In which case, your view is anti-intentionalist.

[@whycantiremainanonymous8091]

@@KaneB You're trying to press my position (well, it's not my original invention, but let's call it mine) into the logical grid you started the video with. It's a very Analytic thing to do, but misses the point entirely. The interpreter *responds* to the work of art, so goes beyond the imputed intention, but still has to refer to the intention as her *starting* point. It's neither an intentionalist nor an anti-intentionalist position, because intent is neither definitive nor irrelevant. The meaning of works of art is not propositional, so "p" and "not p" add more confusion than clarity to the discussion. And about being late to the party, the conversation metaphor has been in use since at least the 1920s. The implied author (the obvious inspiration for the less useful term "hypothetical intentionalism") is an idea going back to the 1950s and 1960s.

[@cdrksn]

⁠@@whycantiremainanonymous8091 wimsatt and Beardsley were outmoded by then in the continental tradition? They precede Barthes death of the author by 30 years

[@analitika3075]

Шалтай балтай

[@Caligulahahah]

#BroccolidoesntmeanCauliflower

[@fontenbleau]

i will feed this to my young Ai model 😊 to learn about world

[@OBGynKenobi]

I think the bigger question here is, what is art? For example, if I put one shoe on top of a microwave and I say it's art, is it really art?

[@blackeyefly]

Kane made a video earlier arguing there is no such thing as art

[@OBGynKenobi]

@@blackeyefly yes, which makes this video perplexing.

[@blackeyefly]

@@OBGynKenobi What is perplexing about it?

[@KaneB]

@@blackeyefly Well, I'm very well known for only making videos about things that I agree with. So it is a bit odd that I would make a video about different views of art interpretation, given that I think there is no such thing as art.

[@femboyorigami]

@@OBGynKenobi are kane's intentions relevant to the meaning of this video?