Artistic Intent Still Matters.

If an artist isn’t invested in what their work means, should we expect the viewer to be?

It’s a simple question, but it gets at something that’s easy to dismiss: artistic intent. We’ve become comfortable with the idea that artists don’t control the meaning of their work. Instead, viewers bring their own experiences, histories, biases, and associations to an artwork. Of course they do. Interpretation matters. It opens the work up and allows it to entertain conversations the artist may never have anticipated. But i’m not saying that intent and meaning are the same thing, because they aren’t. In fact, I don’t think they can ever be the same thing. Intent finds a form, and the form finds the public. What matters is how intention takes form, and what that form makes possible for the viewer.

But interpretation doesn’t make intent irrelevant. Intent sets the stage. It establishes the baseline conditions under which an artwork enters the world. And artistic intent lives in far more than an artist statement explaining what a work is “about.” Fundamentally, it’s in the work itself and in all the decisions surrounding it: the title, materials, construction, lighting, display, form, and context. It’s in the wall text and in what the artist chooses to say or not say about the work.

Even something as seemingly neutral as a materials list can direct how we think. The order in which materials are named creates hierarchy. How specifically they’re identified changes how we understand them. Materials left off the list can become invisible even while they’re physically right in front of us. “Wood” asks us to think differently than “Oak,” “found lumber,” or “wood from my childhood home.” These choices start shaping our experience with the work before interpretation has really even begun.

The artwork itself, though, carries the greatest responsibility. If a work is supposedly about labor, memory, absurdity, desire, or change, something within the work should make that available to us. It doesn’t have to literally illustrate the idea or deliver a single, straightforward message. It can be ambiguous. Ambiguity isn’t the absence of artistic intent. But there’s a big difference between ambiguity and something that’s arbitrary, random, or accidental. The work should contain some essence of what the artist claims, something that gives the viewer a reason to move in that direction.

This is where intent and interpretation work together rather than against each other. The artist proposes, the viewer encounters. Artistic intent informs meaning, but meaning emerges through the relationship between the artwork and the viewer.

But that exchange can get messy. Neither artists nor viewers make statements about a work that are entirely absolute, coherent, or corresponding—and maybe no statement about an artwork can ever be all three. By absolute, I mean a statement capable of accounting for everything the work is and does, which may be impossible. By coherent, I mean that the ideas being proposed actually hold together rather than contradicting one another. And by corresponding, I mean that what’s being thought, said about, or felt from the work has some demonstrable relationship to what’s actually there—to the object, image, materials, form, experience, qualities, and conditions of its display.

Artists can fail at this. We’ve all encountered work where the artist’s explanation is more convincing than the work itself, or where an elaborate statement makes claims the artwork simply can’t support. But viewers fail at it too. An interpretation can be imaginative, articulate, and even persuasive while having very little correspondence to the work in front of us. Interpretation isn’t automatically validated simply because someone can make it.

That matters because interpretation needs some resistance from the work itself. Not every reading is equally convincing, just as not every statement of artistic intent is equally convincing. Both should be tested against the work by asking: What’s actually there? What decisions were made? What does the work allow us to reasonably claim, and where are we filling in the gaps ourselves? The inability of either the artist or viewer to fully account for all that the artwork is, doesn’t make meaning arbitrary. It simply means neither side necessarily gets to claim the whole thing.

Susan Sontag was already suspicious of our compulsion to interpret in her 1964 essay Against Interpretation. Her argument wasn’t that we should stop thinking about art, but that interpretation can become so important that it replaces our experience of the artwork itself. We become preoccupied with figuring out what a work “means” and risk overlooking what it actually does: how it looks, feels, sounds, occupies space, and so on. Her famous closing call for “an erotics of art” rather than a hermeneutics of art is a reminder that an artwork isn’t simply a container of meaning waiting for someone to decode it. It’s more physical; something to experience.

That seems especially relevant. Interpretation can illuminate a work, but it can also overwhelm it. The risk comes when interpretation is given absolute authority. A viewer can certainly find meanings an artist never intended, and those meanings might be accurate, revealing, or even more compelling than the artist’s original intent. But interpretation can also hijack a work. It can turn an artwork into something political, autobiographical, or excessively symbolic while overlooking the decisions the artist actually made—and sometimes overlooking the work itself.

Artists don’t have to surrender their work simply because it’s entered the public. And the possibility of being misunderstood shouldn’t make artists keep their work to themselves or try to protect it from meanings they can’t control. Instead, you can stand your ground. You can acknowledge what someone else sees while still being able to say, I appreciate that interpretation of the work, but it’s not what I intended, and here’s why. That doesn’t deny the viewer. It recognizes the artist.

Atlanta rapper and hip-hop artist Killer Mike offers another way of thinking about that responsibility: “I think artists have an obligation to create art. I think that if you’re compelled to take a stand you are absolutely obligated to do so.” His point isn’t that every artist has to speak about everything with authority. It’s that when an artist is compelled to say something, that impulse matters. The artist’s voice isn’t incidental to the work; it’s the reason the work exists in the first place.

So I believe authorship still means something. Making an artwork is an accumulation of choices, and those choices come from somewhere. Intent doesn’t guarantee meaning, prescribe interpretation, or give the artist permanent ownership over every possible understanding. But the existence of multiple interpretations shouldn’t erase the person who made the thing, the decisions that shaped it, or the reasons it took the form it did. Intent isn’t the final word on an artwork, but it still deserves to remain part of the conversation.