by kouru225 | 2026-02-20 00:44:33+00:00
sorry for the wall of text but this is something I think about a lot so I ended up writing a lot

There are a lot of reasons why the intention of the artist is a bad metric for artistic value and there’s a ton of important literature about this

The first obvious point is that the meaning of communication is defined by its endpoint. If I send a message that says “I love you” and somehow the message gets garbled in transmission and ends up reading “I hate you,” then the message that I’ve sent is “I hate you” regardless of my intentions. You can take this a step further: if you want to write an essay attacking capitalism, but everyone who reads it comes out thinking more highly of capitalism and your essay is successfully used for years to help defend of capitalism from critiques, then what you’ve written is a defense of capitalism. This is the main gist behind what’s called Reader Response Theory: the meaning is generated by the reader (or in between the reader and the text) and not by the writer.

As a communications problem, this is even more relevant for art because art is indirect communication by its very nature. Storytelling, for example doesn’t ever actually try to communicate any single thing. The storyteller creates many fictional people, each of whom have their own messages they want to get across, and creates a web of relationships/events between them. It’s an ecosystem at heart. Without any clear/direct message, the margin for error rapidly increases. The artist obviously has to know that this is the case when they choose to make art. If they wanted to get across a single message or intention, then why did they choose a medium that’s so notoriously bad at getting across a single intention? Obviously some artists are just delusional and don’t accept the reality of their medium, but that doesn’t change the facts

Imagine a hypothetical scenario where a storyteller writes a story with a narrator that clearly handholds the audience and explicitly says what the artist means, but the audience doesn’t agree with the narrator. In that case, how many readers will praise the storyteller for their interesting use of an unreliable narrator? Art functions this way on its own, and this is another reason why intentionality is a bad metric: the artist has to make the art work, and that functionality has properties of its own that supersede the artists intentions. This was the main argument of an historically important essay entitled The Intentional Fallacy by Whimsat and Beardsley: Primarily, the story must work. The meaning comes secondarily from trying to understand why it works. We forget this, but the art that we engage with is always art that has been pre-selected by the demands of the art form itself, which no single artist has control over. We engage with art through survivorship bias.

Where I think most people get tripped up is that one of the recent and most popular demands of art has been Conceptual Art, which focuses on the idea or intention rather than the object itself. This is an outgrowth of an individualistic art movement that, honestly, is popular because of political motives. The CIA straight up funded it. I’m not saying that’s bad. Honestly I love any government that funds the arts. I’m just saying it’s not the entirety of art and we can’t be subservient to it and the ideology it represents. You don’t need to justify your enjoyment of a blurry image because it has a story behind it. Moreover, it doesn’t make sense to ignore the image and argue that the story is the meaning or the value of the art. Art that uses backstories effectively can just be redefined as multimedia art that combines the art medium with storytelling, and now suddenly what you thought was the intention of the artist is just the quality of the output again