Letters to the Editor

As a newspaper critic, I don’t answer reader complaints in ``Letters to the Editor.'' After all, they're not written to me. Besides, everyone's entitled to sound off. Even when letter writers make their opinions sound like fact, I hold back. Everyone's also entitled to be wrong.

But I made an exception one time because readers who objected to a column I wrote unwittingly raised a larger issue that warrants discussion. In the column, I said that a sculpture called “Nobody's Listening” fronting a City Hall in Florida - which shows five hunched figures - reflects badly on the five city commissioners.

The sculptor took exception. He the sculpture deals with the racial strife and dissension about the Vietnam War in the '60s, when the work was created.

City officials also wrote letters to the editor, saying I hadn't done my homework because I didn't take into account Cartlidge's intention.

But here’s the thing. Since when are art lovers obliged to see a work according to an artist's dictate? Wouldn't such a thing mean that an explanation needs to accompany every work made? And wouldn't that make art nothing more than an illustration of a thesis?

In that sense, I also question the wisdom of titling an artwork. I'm thinking of Art Spiegelman's New Yorker magazine cover drawing of a crucified rabbit a few years ago, which had the Catholic League for Religion and Civil Rights up in arms.

The drawing might have been defensible if he hadn't titled his work, ``Theology of the Tax Cut Cut,'' making reference to a rabbit in the drawing dressed in a suit with empty pockets pulled out against a background of Form 1040A.

Spiegelman said he drew inspiration from the fact that April 15 - the tax deadline - came the day before Easter.

But if he hadn't given an explanation or title, it could have been defended as a visual pun. After all, crucifixions are not exclusive to Christianity. The Romans used them as a method of capital punishment on their slaves. Apply the ancient concept of crucifixion to paying wages to the IRS and you've got slaves being punished by the capitol.

Spiegelman's drawing could have been defended this way, especially since, unlike Christ's wounds on the cross, the rabbit showed no crown of thorns and no sword-pierced side.

Artists who insist on explaining their symbology not only create problems for their work, but they also miss the point of art. It's not math. There's no one answer.

Andres Serrano made the same mistake when he called his photograph of a cross submerged in urine ``Piss Christ.'' If he hadn't named it, if he hadn't told us that the golden fluid was urine, the image could have been a pictorial of Christianity engulfed: in crassness, in commercialism.

Artists who narrow the range of interpretation reduce art to a visual aid. Picasso was guilty of this narrowing. Even though he said, ``Paintings are not done to decorate apartments, but are instruments for war for attack and defense against the enemy,'' he insisted that the bull in ``Still Life With a Bull,'' painted in 1938, was not political.

Imagine all those who suffered under facism who might have seen the bull's brutality as an appropriate symbol of bullies and taken comfort in that, had Picasso not dissuaded them.

If artists insist on answering questions that their art poses, we may as well stay home.
Art shouldn't have to come with answer sheets. It ought to generate dialogues, not soliloquies, to stand on its own.

And on its own, a five-figure work called ``Nobody's Listening'' in front of a City Hall suggests the five commissioners who work inside ignore their constituents.

So this is my plea. Either stop complaining when people find their own meaning in your titles or stop titling.