Monday, August 17, 2009

Deflecting Questions About Meaning to Viewers

A dictionary definition: "deflect": "to turn aside especially from a straight course or fixed direction"

Don't most expressions of art, except perhaps the most painfully illustrational which is straight and set in its discourse or the exceedingly rare astute and dead on encapsulation of a singular resonant meaning which though fixed is somehow neither straight nor diverted, do this if the expressions hope to last beyond the one liner? It's another way of hoping the viewer sees and thinks, as well as looks and receives some imparted meaning.

Plenty of people like to be told a piece of art means X or means Y, but often meaning lies in the dialogue between the piece (as a vehicle for the artist) and viewers, and viewers wear different perceptual lens. Art may well posit X but be received as Y... though that hardly makes X and Y interchangeable.

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