Just as there are no known boundaries to artistic interpretation for the creators of the world, one may speculate that there is also no finite number of critical interpretations to every piece brought forth for display. The affinity one reviewer feels for the work of James Cameron in his latest blockbuster may be lost on the lover of independent cinema longing for the latest low-budget release starring Chloe Sevigny. The brilliance in the pages of Ian McEwan’s body of work may be impenetrable to an avid reader of Dean Koontz. Furthermore, the chart-topping music of Kanye West could be absolute drivel to a lifetime lover of The Rolling Stones. In the gigantic melting pot of individualism that is the planet Earth, we are gifted with as many types of representation as there are people born every day.
In studying art and its effect on citizens of the world, one must realize that the significance of any work relies on its interpretation from the masses and the general allure of art in any format is rooted in an individual’s personal reaction to it, seeing it as an event rather than an object. It is in this reaction that art – be it visual, lyrical, theatrical, poetic, or any other known or unknown medium -- is able to exist as something which makes our world not only more habitable, but by far also much more interesting.
In Tony Kushner’s brilliant masterpiece, Angels in America, the Valium-addicted Harper Pitt speculates on whether a man in her hallucination is truly a figment of her imagination, or her drug-addled mind’s convoluted byproduct representation of someone she has met at some point before: “I don't understand this. If I didn't ever see you before, and I don't think I did, then I don't think you should be here in this hallucination because in my experience the mind, which is where hallucinations come from, shouldn't be able to make anything up that wasn't there to start with, that didn't enter it from experience from the real world. Imagination can't create anything new can it? It only recycles bits and pieces from the world and reassembles them into visions….[so] when we think we've escaped the unbearable ordinariness and, well, untruthfulness of our lives it's really only the same old ordinariness and falseness rearranged into the appearance of novelty and truth. Nothing unknown is knowable.” Harper’s soliloquy, which occurs during a pivotal scene that shows her dissatisfaction with life and her character’s deepest emotional turmoil, opens the doors for all sorts of debate on art, creation, and the subject of originality.
According to the Bible, God was creator of the artist, the original artist, the artist formally known as “Our Father.” He created man in his own image, and he sculpted an entire world of something totally out of nothing, but was this creation something to be habitable and more interesting or was this the manifestation of his interpretation of something else? Artists of the world follow in the footsteps of their own great creator by emitting countless works of beauty, and it is unlikely that any creative endeavor is wholly inspired, planned, and brought to fruition without an artist’s speculation on what effect its subject and style will have on others and with a barrage of incidental personal aspects from the artist’s own life. Despite the magnificence that lies in the body of the world of art, one can only wonder: Are these the interpretations of a habitable and interesting world portrayed by the artist, or is it the work of an artist that makes the world a more habitable and more interesting place to live?
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