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Symbolism and Art Nanonymous No.16548 [D][S][L][A][C] >>16549
Hello everyone!

Sometimes you hear people say in regard to certain pieces of media that their opinions about it changed over time, which implies that either they just didn't get it the first time, or there are different ways to interpret it. What do you think about the latter though? If you have two different intelligent people come to have widely differing opinions of what it is about, then can't you say that it is an "Ink Blotch" that doesn't have any real meaning other then what the viewer sees in it.

If that is the case do you think it can still be a good show?

Do you think that the good ones avoid this and have an objective meaning?

I think one of the reasons people like art like this is because they just like being confused, they like trying to figure things out. But if it can't be figured out then is it still fun?

Do you think symbolism just makes things needlessly obtuse? if you have a good story that is already complicated, then why make it harder to understand? Or if they did that then does it lose the certain charm and difficulty that makes it engaging?

Nanonymous No.16549 [D]
>>16548
why do people like art? Look at it from the standpoint of evolution: we evolved to chase animals and fuck women and care for babies. Why do we waste our time looking at art? One hypothesis: it shortwires the pattern matching parts of our brains, they go looking for patterns that are almost there, but then keep changing. "Interpretations", when you look at them, are just that: patterns that people have managed to pull out of the media. But you can still have better and worse art under this view, because better art will override the pattern matching parts of our brain better than poor art. A vast array of different interpretations is actually a sign of good art, because it shows there are at least that many different interpretations to be found.

Another hypothesis: media trains us to fit into our social environment. The basic proof for this thesis is: people have been writing for thousands of years, anything published recently is necessarily crap in comparison to the best works of all time. And yet, people consume recent media in droves. Why? So someone goes to a film, and they think "that was good", but when they talk to their friends, they find out everyone thought it was terrible. Suddenly, they hate it too! Understand that when they "like" such a film it is little more than their brain telling them that all their friends will like it, so they should like it too. When they find out otherwise, their brain naturally updates. Their opinion of the film will vary with the time, as fads come and go, with who their friends are, and of course as their friends opinions change as well.

I think both these views are reductionist, but you can't understand art without knowing them, especially when you know that most art is aimed at the masses. Instead, high art exists to get across some otherwise unspeakable qualia of human experience. The adaptive quality is obvious, since it makes you more capable of understanding your own life and the world you live in. Better art is capable of getting across deeper qualias in higher fidelity, ideally to a larger group of people. It takes the most skilled artists to create the best art. That a piece of high art has multiple interpretations can be explained in three ways: first, it is a poor work of art, and so does a poor job of getting across it's intended message. Second, it is a great work, but it is necessarily only accesible to a small number of people. Everyone outside that group comes away with faulty interpretations. Third, it is a great work, and widely accessible. But because it is so great, those who write down interpretations have the role of the artist, of putting into words an unspeakable qualia. Without resorting to metaphors borrowed from the piece itself, they fall into the same fate as the poor artist, of having their interpretation be widely misunderstood and misinterpreted.

That a single person's interpretation can change over time can be explained similarly. For a poor piece of media, it falls into pattern matching territory, as their brain tries to identify which qalia it is so very close to, but doesn't quite reach. For a better piece of media, who they are changes over time, and so the media becomes alternately less and more accesible. While it remains accessible to them, they try and understand at a more rational level what the media means, but necessarily fall short. This is why they never quite feel like they have a solid grasp on it.

Now you've asked about symbolism, and complexity, and so on. I've given you three understandings of art, and you'll have to apply all three. Lets use an example of symbolism, where a donkey can both be a literal donkey, but also symbolize evil. The question we'll be asking in each case is why doesn't the author just tell us which one they mean. For pattern matching, this is quite clear: they don't mean one or the other, they've just picked something that has two meanings to keep you guessing. For social bonding, we have another answer: the correct interpretation naturally varies depending on the current social environment, combined with contextual clues provided in the media. The author is proving they understand current social trends, while challenging viewers to do the same. In our example, maybe the viewer is supposed to understand that the donkey can also represent a democrat. Finally, for high art: we are trying to get across a qualia, and such symbolism does this via a metaphor. The author can't just say which of various meanings they refer, because they mean all of them simultaneously, as well as some combination of them that cannot be understood through words. To pick one would veil their reader's eyes to the others.

The more complex issue is, given some piece of media, figuring out which of the three apply. Mass media is unilaterally in the second camp, and you can detect it quite easily by looking at budgets and the number of writers. You need to be careful though, not to think that the surface level details as too important. Watchmen was originally supposed to be written using a slate of traditional superheroes, although this was struck down before it was written. One might be mistaken into thinking "this is just a superhero comic". Same goes for most media. The trickier problem is telling apart pattern matching from real art. The trouble is that a given author will often mix in a number of fancy seeming symbols by which they intend nothing. Add in that you can't understand the extent of any media, and you will find it's nearly impossible to really know what they intended. My response is that you shouldn't bother. If a piece of art is deeply meaningful to you, then who cares whether the author intended anything you got out of it? And if a piece of media seems like a steaming pile of bullshit, then who cares if the author was honestly trying to answer life, the universe, and everything. But the corrolary to all this is that you should avoid challenging other people when they present an interpretation that you didn't see, since they might hold it as deeply as you hold yours.

Nanonymous No.16598 [D]
You can conceive meaning through allegories/symbollism. There's a "rule" in cinema called "show, down tell". It means that, instead of having a character describing something about your plot, you should show it visually.
Using symbollism and allegories is one way of doing that. You can give other meaning to some scene, or you can give more depth to something.
I could give practical examples, but then I don't know if you have watched the same shows I did. Hightly recommend you watch the movie called The Wall (1982) as an exercise on allegories:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pink_Floyd_The_Wall_(film)

The same goes not just for movies, but also mythology. See for example the Eros and Psyche myth, beautifully represented on Howls Moving Castle:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cupid_and_Psyche
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howl%27s_Moving_Castle_%28film%29


But hey, to quote the Wachowskis:
"Art is like religion. For the believers, it's everything. For anyone else, it's just a pile of stinking bullshit."