Meaning in Meaningless Art

-- By AnthonyPhan - 17 Feb 2025

Dissecting figurative language and analyzing diction is the name of the game for every introductory literature class. The professor of fine arts urges you to contemplate why the painter chose to utilize umber red to depict a vase. Musicologists rip apart songs in some attempt to siphon a deeper meaning. We don’t turn on Sunday Night Football and expect to draw out a metaphysical nature of the world. So why is it that we want — no, we need — for art to provide us with a deeper meaning?

Perhaps meaning is the defining factor that separates the arts from its counterparts. If a piece of art fails to offer any further meaning, can it no longer be considered art? That’s definitely one way to characterize it. After all, so much of art is created with the intention for the audience to derive a deeper meaning. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby is no stranger to symbolism. It’d be frivolously contrarian to suggest that the light was green simply because Fitzgerald had an affinity for verdigris, rather than as a symbol for the elusive American Dream.

Unintentional Meaning

Fahrenheit 451

However, at the same time, so much meaning is retroactively imbued in nooks and crannies where the author had no intention. The most famous example of this might be Fahrenheit 451. It has been primarily taught as a political critique of totalitarian censorship, but this was never the intention. The author himself has explicitly rejected this proposition. Of course, I do not mean to contend that Ray Bradbury wrote a mindless tale lacking any analysis to extract. The book is a blaring caution against how technology rots and numbs society and a reflection on the way people are “being turned into morons by TV.” But taking the “true meaning” of the novel aside, if Bradbury never intended for Fahrenheit 451 to be an indictment on censorship, is it plausible to still say that that is what the novel stands for?

Tom Stoppard

Tom Stoppard, when discussing people’s analysis of his plays, said “When people discuss his plays, he says that he feels like he's standing at customs watching an official ransack his luggage. He cheerfully declares responsibility for a play about two people, and suddenly the officer is finding all manner of exotic contraband like the nature of God and identity, and while he can't deny that they're there, he can't for the life of him remember putting them there. In the end, a play is not the product of an idea; an idea is the product of a play.” So this is to say that there is no meaning to be found within such works. After all, Stoppard cedes that he can’t deny their existence. The question therefore returns not if it’s rational or sensible or possible to derive deeper meaning from art, but more to the purpose.

I think the reason we so desperately want to extract meaning from art is the inherent human need to rationalize. Everything seemingly needs a reason, and without one, things begin to feel pointless. But the beauty of art is that it’s intrinsically valuable. The jazz band that’s playing before you get you get on the train at 42nd is worth stopping a few minutes for because the saxophone player just hit an extraordinary riff. It doesn’t have to mean anything more than that. But it seems to be in human nature to force ourselves to assign meaning to art. In that way, the intrinsic value of art seems to fade if a piece cannot be enjoyed for its own sake without attributing external ideas to it. As Stoppard might put it, art is no longer the product; rather, it is treated as a means to a different end.

Intentional Meaninglessness

Cocteau Twins

Some art seems to arise as a rejection of the notion that art needs meaning. The vocalist of The Cocteau Twins, Elizabeth Fraser, makes use of puirt à beul (a native Scottish form of mouth music), reversed words, words of foreign languages without reference to their meaning, and free syllables. As such, many of their songs appear to be intentionally meaningless. The focus is purely on the sonically beautiful quality of her voice. Although the songs are purposed to be meaningless, people still seek to decode their art into symbols of disarray or heavy drug use.

Recession Pop

Another example is the era of “recession pop.” Recession pop refers to the body of popular music following the Great Recession of 2008 — think Like a G6, Party Rock Anthem, basically any song from the Black Eyed Peas, etc. These songs were literally designed to be nothing but frenetic beats and vacantly optimistic lyrics that people could dance their troubles away to. And yet, these simple club songs have been grouped and investigated to find representations of consumerism or themes of economic hardship.

It seems to me that no matter the intention of the creator, meaning will somehow find itself to be attributed to art. And if the phenomenon is inevitable, it may be entirely unproductive to view the attribution of meaning to art through the lens of right or wrong. Finding meaning is perhaps a form of art, such that if art is treated as a means to an end, that end is art in itself. And if that is true, then what is this inquiry but yet another attempt to find meaning in art?

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