snet0
Joined 6 years ago
Joined 6 years ago
There were multiple failures here, but a single step could've prevented the entire hack: industry-standard encryption of the sensitive information.
The real question is: who are you fooling? In a field where there's no right answer, the only person being fooled by you avoiding an honest reading is yourself. If you can make the right noises to trick someone into thinking you've considered the story, why not expose yourself to art and actually consider the story?
The point, in my view, of art is to form personal relationships with the artwork. I can read Notes From Underground with no background on the era or the author, and pass my own judgements on the characters. I can read the thoughts of the Underground Man and feel them in any which way that strikes me. The point isn't that Dostoevsky is telling me something, rather he has presented an opportunity for me to explore something I've not explored before. How guided and directed that exploration is remains mostly in the hands of the author, but sometimes all it takes is a presentation of a character and the rest of the work is the reader trying to integrate that character into their own worldview.
The most boring art is the art where the author stands next to it and describes what it's about. That's the art where I think "what's the point of reading": the author has summarised the intent of his work, presented the canonical reading and disparaged other readings. You might as well just have the intent summarised on a post-it.
The most powerful art can be the most "meaningless", the art where most of the work is by the reader, searching for connections between what's on the paper and what's in their head. Have you never spent hours with a poem or piece of music, and each retread sparks some new attachment to an experience or feeling? Perhaps the author never even considered their work to relate to how you related to your friends as a child, but I see it as totally wrong to claim that either you or the author have erred in that reading.
If your definition of "interpretation" involves making claims about the author or empirical details, it is clear you can be incorrect. Otherwise, I think everything else is permissible.
The article even discusses certain readers' developing relationship over time! The book hasn't changed, the text is static. Even within a person, the understanding of the text is fluid. To say it could possibly be misunderstood is to say that there is a wrong way of understanding, but clearly there are at least multiple correct - or at least not incorrect - understandings!
A certain subculture of online males have fallen in love with Patrick Bateman. Now some of them might not have read or watched American Psycho, so to say they misunderstand the art is nonsense as they haven't actually seen it. For those that have and still choose to worship the obviously awful character, I see a lot of people say they haven't "understood" the film/book. They have! They just disagree with author's own interpretation!
[0] - https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.03762