The Role of Interpretation in Art: Perspectives and Value

Every time you stand before a painting, read a poem, or watch a film, you are doing something more than simply observing. You are interpreting – actively constructing meaning from what the artist has made. But here is the philosophical puzzle: whose meaning counts? The artist’s original intention? The cultural conventions of the time? Or the meaning that emerges for you, the audience, in this very moment? Art and interpretation is one of the most contested territories in philosophy of art, and the answers reveal a great deal about what art fundamentally is and why it continues to matter.

What does it mean to interpret art? 🔗

At its most basic level, interpretation is the attribution of meaning to a work of art. But this definition is deceptively simple. Interpretation involves two different orientations: it can mean retrieving a meaning already embedded in the work, or it can mean imposing a meaning that the interpreter actively ascribes. This distinction sits at the heart of almost every debate in the philosophy of art.

When we ask what Kafka’s Metamorphosis is really about, or whether the spinning top at the end of Nolan’s Inception signals reality or dream, we are searching for implicit content – something beyond the literal surface. In philosophy of art, interpretation typically refers to assignments of meaning that involve deeper analysis and creative thought, such as examining Velázquez’s Las Meninas to explore the relationship between painter, viewer, and depicted subject. Interpretation, in other words, is not just description – it is an active intellectual and sometimes emotional engagement with a work.

The intentionalist view: the artist’s meaning matters 🔗

One major school of thought holds that the correct interpretation of a work of art is the one that best recovers what the artist intended. This position, known as intentionalism, has strong intuitive appeal. After all, art is a communicative act. When an artist makes something, there is presumably a purpose, a message, a vision they are trying to convey. Shouldn’t that be the standard against which interpretations are measured?

Actual intentionalism – the most direct version of this view – holds that a work’s meaning is determined by what the artist genuinely intended. Some versions of this position are absolute, allowing that artists can intend their work to mean virtually anything they choose. Other versions are more moderate, accepting that an artist’s intention must at least be consistent with what the work’s form and conventions can plausibly sustain.

There is a long historical precedent for giving the artist a privileged role. In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe outlined criteria for critics interpreting art, placing the artist’s context and purpose at the center of critical engagement. The underlying idea is that knowledge of an artist’s life, historical moment, and declared aims can genuinely deepen our understanding of the work – not as a distraction, but as a legitimate means to a richer appreciation.

The intentional fallacy 🔗

Yet intentionalism has faced serious criticism. In 1946, W.K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley introduced the influential concept of the intentional fallacy – the mistake of judging or interpreting a work by the artist’s stated or inferred intentions. Their argument was that once a work is completed and released into the world, it exists independently of its creator. Anti-intentionalism holds that a work’s meaning is entirely determined by linguistic and literary conventions, not by what the artist privately intended. The work, in this view, is autonomous – its meanings belong to the work itself, not to any individual who made it.

A striking illustration of this comes from dramatic criticism. Once a work is completed and presented to the world, the artist becomes just one critic among many. There may even be valid and illuminating interpretations – such as Freudian readings of Shakespeare’s Hamlet – that the original artist could not possibly have considered. The work, having entered the cultural world, generates meanings that exceed any single intention.

Barthes and the birth of the reader 🔗

No thinker pushed the anti-intentionalist argument further or more dramatically than the French critic Roland Barthes. In his landmark 1967 essay The Death of the Author, Barthes argued that an author’s intentions and biographical context should not govern the interpretation of their work. Once a text is created, he claimed, it takes on an independent existence – becoming a space in which the reader, not the author, generates meaning.

For Barthes, the meaning of a work lies not in its origin but in its destination – which is the reader. To assign ultimate interpretive authority to the author is to impose a limit on the work, to close off the rich plurality of meanings that a text can sustain across different readers, contexts, and times. This was a radical position. Traditional literary criticism had long treated the author as the privileged explainer of the work. Barthes wanted to dismantle that hierarchy entirely.

It is important not to misread Barthes here. The death of the author does not mean the creator’s disappearance – it means their absorption into the art itself. The reader’s interpretation remains rooted in the work; it is not an invitation to read anything into anything. Barthes wanted to extend the interpretation of a work of art to include the interaction of other texts and the responses of the reader – not to abolish meaning but to multiply and democratize it.

Gadamer and the fusion of horizons 🔗

While Barthes approached the question from literary theory, the German philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer tackled it from hermeneutics – the philosophical study of interpretation itself. His monumental work Truth and Method (1960) argued that the experience of art is uniquely suited to revealing how understanding works at a fundamental level.

For Gadamer, art is interrogative by nature – artworks work through a disclosure of meaning, and they are always open to re-interpretation. He rejected the idea that correct interpretation means either reconstructing the author’s original intention or imposing purely subjective reactions. Instead, understanding emerges from a dialogue – what he called a fusion of horizons – between the world of the work and the world of the interpreter.

For Gadamer, meaning emerges not as an object lying in the text or in the interpreter, but as an event resulting from the interaction of the two. This means that a 21st-century reader encountering a Greek tragedy or a Renaissance painting is not simply decoding a historical artifact; they are participating in an ongoing conversation in which new meanings are genuinely disclosed. The work speaks differently across time – and that is not a failure of understanding but a feature of how art lives.

Our understanding of a work of art is always conditioned by our historical situation, and readers bring different assumptions and interests to any work. Textual and artistic meaning, for Gadamer, is therefore not fixed. This does not lead to pure relativism – Gadamer was clear that interpretations can be better or worse, more or less attuned to what the work discloses – but it does affirm genuine interpretive pluralism: the same work can sustain multiple non-erroneous readings.

The middle ground: hypothetical intentionalism 🔗

Between the poles of strict intentionalism and the open pluralism of Barthes or Gadamer, philosophers have developed hypothetical intentionalism as a more measured position. According to hypothetical intentionalism, the correct meaning of a work is determined by the best hypothesis about the artist’s intention made by a qualified audience, based on all publicly available information about the artist and the work at the time of its creation.

This position preserves the relevance of artistic context without tying interpretation to whatever the artist privately and secretly intended. What matters is not the actual intention, confirmed by direct access to the artist’s mind, but the most reasonable interpretation an informed audience would construct. This keeps interpretation disciplined and grounded in the work itself while remaining open to the historical and cultural circumstances that shaped it.

Multiple interpretations and the value of art 🔗

One of the most significant philosophical insights emerging from this debate is that the openness of art to multiple interpretations is not a bug – it is a feature. It is precisely what gives great art its enduring power. Critics can think of better interpretations than the artist did, giving a greater aesthetic reward in subsequent encounters with the work. The work grows, in a sense, with each new reading.

This has direct implications for how we value art. Gadamer argued that artworks work through a disclosure of meaning that establishes art’s cognitive status – meaning that art is not merely decorative or entertaining, but genuinely knowledge-bearing. Each interpretation opens a new dimension of that knowledge. When a viewer sees something in a painting that no previous critic noticed, or when a production of Shakespeare illuminates a dimension of the text that earlier stagings missed, the work’s value is deepened rather than distorted.

This is also why the philosophy of art is distinguished from art criticism: philosophy asks not “what does this particular work mean?” but “what is the nature of the interpretive process itself?” Understanding that process helps us engage with art more fully – as active participants in the making of meaning, rather than passive receivers of a fixed message.

The role of conventions and context 🔗

Interpretation does not happen in a vacuum. Which aesthetic properties we perceive a work as having depends on which category we perceive the work as belonging to – a point made forcefully by philosopher Kendall Walton. To interpret a work well, we need at least some understanding of its genre, its historical moment, and its cultural conventions. A piece of music heard without any knowledge of its tradition will be interpreted very differently – and often less richly – than by someone who understands its forms and references.

This is why context matters, even for those who resist pure intentionalism. Context does not reduce interpretation to biography or history; rather, it provides the framework within which the work’s possibilities can be recognized. The more we understand the world from which a work emerged, the wider the range of meanings we are able to perceive within it – and the more responsibly we can judge between better and worse interpretations.

Why interpretation is central to art’s value 🔗

Art, unlike a technical manual or a news report, does not deliver its content in a single definitive package. It invites engagement, reflection, and re-engagement over time. The fact that a Rembrandt portrait can mean something different to a 17th-century Dutch viewer, a 19th-century Romantic critic, and a contemporary museum visitor is not a sign of confusion – it is a testament to the work’s richness. The aesthetic experience involves a total concentration on the perceptual details of an aesthetic object, heightening consciousness and exercising capacities for perceptual awareness and discrimination.

Interpretation, then, is not something we do to art from the outside – it is the very activity through which we come into meaningful contact with it. Every serious encounter with art is an act of interpretation, and every interpretation adds something to the ongoing conversation that a work generates across time. Works of art are culturally emergent entities, and their meanings continue to emerge through the interpretive acts of each generation that encounters them. To engage with art is to participate in one of the most distinctly human activities: the collaborative, never-finished making of meaning.

What do you think? If the meaning of a work of art can legitimately differ from what the artist intended, does that make interpretation more valuable or less reliable – and is there a meaningful difference between those two things? And if artworks are always open to re-interpretation, as Gadamer argues, can any interpretation ever be considered definitive or final?

References

1. https://iep.utm.edu/art-and-interpretation/
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aesthetics
3. https://www.britannica.com/topic/philosophy-of-art/The-interpretation-of-art
4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Death_of_the_Author
5. https://interestingliterature.com/2021/10/barthes-death-of-the-author-summary-analysis/
6. https://www.michigandaily.com/opinion/columns/we-must-stop-getting-death-of-the-author-wrong/
7. https://arthistoryunstuffed.com/roland-barthes-the-death-of-the-author/
8. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/gadamer-aesthetics/
9. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans-Georg_Gadamer
10. https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Gadamer's-hermeneutics,-non-intentionalism-and-the-Weberman/40ae65dce48a13bd5136cc54d74076231d65a412
11. https://www.britannica.com/topic/philosophy-of-art
12. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/aesthetic-concept/
13. https://www.britannica.com/topic/philosophy-of-art/Mixed-positions
14. https://iep.utm.edu/aesthetics/