I'm in the camp that holds that the artists needs to be trying to communicate something for the work to be art in the first place. There are other words for whe

I'm in the camp that holds that the artists needs to be trying to communicate something for the work to be art in the first place. There are other words for when you're making things and not trying to communicate: illustration, decoration, design, etc. These words aren't insults (I'm an illustrator and a designer), they are just different things and it's useful have different terms for different things, and use the most apt one. > “Art is a human activity consisting in this, that one man consciously, by means of certain external signs, hands on to others feelings he has lived through, and that other people are infected by these feelings and also experience them.” That's Tolstoy's definition, and it's basically the one I stick with because it filters out the most things that don't seem to be art, and leaves the most things in which seem to be. It's an ad hoc, imperfect definition, but to me it's better than the one that says "anything is art, and art means whatever I want it to". In terms of interpretation, I believe most art is open to a pretty wide range of interpretations, and you can make a strong case for the meaning to be something other than the most literal reading. Artists have subconscious minds too. But, in my opinion there are wrong interpretations, and the easiest ones to identify are ones that have no textual evidence ("Macbeth is actually about radio astronomy") so I don't agree with statements like: > I believe that no interpretation of an artwork can be right or wrong. Because where does that leave us? A world where art has a lot less value because it can just be anything to anybody. If it can mean anything, it effectively means nothing. Hard to find common ground or have a shared cultural language when you operate like that.