Fundamental to our understanding of making art is the fact one is frequently misunderstood.

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Fundamental to our understanding of making art is the fact one is frequently misunderstood. /// But how misunderstood should one allow oneself to be? /// Comedy should not be mistaken for bitterness, yet mostly that is the well from which it springs. /// If one is understood too much it might also feel like a misunderstanding. /// Like an x-ray that sees us as we really are (by seeing straight through us.) /// Critical analysis can be like that x-ray, what it sees is not precisely what is there, both more and less. /// X-ray as a kind of misunderstanding, looking too specifically as a way of mis-seeing. /// But these are not the misunderstandings I meant. /// Anything can be said to concern anything. /// It is not assumed that the artist accurately knows what he or she means. /// There is always the desire to find the meaning behind the intention. /// The advertiser knows the exact intention of his or her work, but the artist does not. /// Yet the artist has an excess of intention. /// Within the very nature of this excess there is a gap, and it is this gap that interpretation seeks to fill. /// It is like a person where you wonder if you really get them, if there is in fact more to get, what they are holding back. /// They are a person but you are an x-ray. /// As if wandering through an airport, the person must submit. /// The artist is holding something back, cannot give you everything, but you will uncover the secret. /// The secret is that the artist cannot possibly know everything his or her work is doing in the world. /// (Or failing to do.) /// People are constantly telling me how great I am. /// Meanwhile, I am dying of loneliness.



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