The problem though, unless it is a blatant message, people see things through their own lens. As I said, the art can tell you more about yourself and your state of mind at the time than what the artist is trying to communicate without making a clear statement of what the piece represents. Sometimes there is no message. Art for art’s sake is a thing too.
A classic example is Ray Bradbury and
Fahrenheit 451. Bradbury wrote it as a comment on the effect of television. But when he explained this in a lecture at a college (maybe USC), the students told him it was about censorship. Bradbury was the author so he should know what it's about. But while I respected Bradbury's skill, he didn't successfully convey the meaning through the medium.
There are limits. There was a Charles Addams cartoon where his "Fester" character sat in movie theater. Everyone around him was sad and some were crying. "Fester," however, was clearly amused. What most found heart-wrenching, he found hilarious. That was the gag but is essentially "Fester" was seeing the film through his own lens.
Another cartoon, artist unknown: A couple is looking at a modern art sculpture of a stylized human figure with a large hole in the middle. The caption was "That reminds me: Did you pack the sandwiches?" The gag is both about modern art and the feelings it evokes, but there's the question of what the sculptor intended to evoke and did he or she succeed.
This isn't about blatant messaging: It's about conveying what the artist intends. A artist who intends to convey a sense of awe fails if most who see it giggle.
So much of art is also based on shared experience to convey a message, such as the "theatre of the mind" aspect of humorous cartooning. If the person who sees the art has a different shared experience, the meaning can be lost. On some carved atlatl throwers from Europe there's an odd motif on the end that fits into the spear socket. Photos I've seen of it are stunning but no one knows what it means. It could have been a prehistoric joke, possibly with crude humor connotations or maybe even a visual pun, but no one in our era knows. What the carvers wished to convey has been lost because we aren't of the same culture.
To be honest, much of art is and has been, what will sell. Douglas Adams penned in one of the
Hitchhiker books "If it means taking the money and run, I for one could use the exercise," and that's probably what goes on most of the time.
