The content of the image is powerful because the door is both real and symbolic, boundary between public and private, inside and out, family and society. An open door policy towards someone draws them from the anonymous to the familial, across a threshold. But this poignancy is none other than openness and secrecy itself, even if the forms it takes today leave permeable and useless the doors of tradition. Openness appears everywhere as congeniality, inclusion, inspection, and most importantly, trust. Openness is both spatially and temporally a mode of fragility and a decisively secular relationship to the world and the universe .
Open houses offer themselves inside-out for the satisfaction of the buyer.
The offen in Offentlichkeit pulls us agoraphobics out of head and house and into the market of ideas, the public sphere where we can no longer mind only our own business. Its opposites in closure promise saftey or exclude, decide, prevent. Secrecy, privacy, interiority, family, hierarchy, control. Closed books are decisions made, closed minds are unassailable by powerful logic, closure orders and satisfies expectations, it makes the world whole again. The day is open, the night is closed, and the signal was at one time, the door.