On Different Interpretations

In matters of art the customer’s always right. An act of art thrives on ambiguities that would spoil an act of science. New York intellectuals praised Grant Wood’s “American Gothic” as an unsparing evocation of rural America’s prune-faced Puritanism. Rural Americans admired it as an affirmation of the country’s rock-solid resolve. Does Joyce’s Ulysses hint that the best hero the 20th century could produce was a clownish free-lance ad salesman, or does it suggest that a humane modern man is in fact a better hero than the blood-guzzling Odysseus? Is The Wizard of Oz a charming fairy tale or an evocation of dark myths straight out of Joseph Campbell – or a campier cult movie than Rocky Horror?

Or all of the above?

Unread books and unseen pictures are like Schrodinger’s cat, abiding in every possible state until you open the box, at which point the waveform collapses and they take on a value that’s unique – not uniquely theirs, but uniquely yours.