Kurduvādi We have a habit of asking the wrong questions about art.
We stand before a Rothko and ask what it means. We hear “I Am the Walrus” and spend decades trying to decode every lyric. We watch 2001: A Space Odyssey and wonder what Stanley Kubrick was trying to tell us. We watch Quentin Tarantino films and ask whether they are about gangsters, movie stars, or revenge.
I think we have been looking in the wrong direction.
What if every work of art is simply a portrait of the artist’s consciousness during the time it was created?
Not a message hidden beneath the canvas. Not a code waiting to be broken. A portrait.
For generations we have treated artists like magicians. We assume they possess some secret that the rest of us cannot quite reach. Critics spend careers searching for symbols. Audiences spend lifetimes debating meanings. Universities fill libraries with interpretations of novels, paintings, and films.
There is nothing wrong with interpretation. It is one of the great pleasures of being human.
I simply think it begins too late.
Before we ask what a work of art means, we should ask what kind of consciousness produced it.
When Quentin Tarantino wrote True Romance, I do not think he was simply writing about Clarence Worley. I think he was revealing himself. A young man consumed by movies, imagining himself standing up to evil, getting the girl, taking the beating, and somehow walking away the hero. The movie breathes with the enthusiasm of someone who still believes cinema can do anything.
That story is the consciousness of a young Quentin Tarantino.
Years later he gives us Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood. I do not see the same consciousness. I see a man thinking about legacy. About growing older. About how history remembers artists whose best work may already be behind them. Leonardo DiCaprio and Brad Pitt are not simply two characters. They feel like two conversations taking place inside one mind. One fears being forgotten. The other carries himself as though the world has already forgotten him.
The films changed because the consciousness changed.
Stanley Kubrick may be an even better example.
People ask what 2001 means.
Perhaps the better question is what fascinated Stanley Kubrick while he was making it. Computers. Evolution. Intelligence. The future. Those interests became the language of his art because they occupied his consciousness. We spend so much energy decoding the symbols that we overlook the person who chose them.
Years later he made Eyes Wide Shut.
Again, people ask what it means.
I ask what occupied Kubrick’s mind during that period of his life. The film becomes less of a puzzle and more of a window into the consciousness that created it. The subject changes because the artist changes. That should not surprise us. It should be the first thing we expect.
The same is true of every songwriter whose music matures, every novelist whose later books become quieter, every painter whose colors darken or brighten with age. We often describe those changes as artistic evolution. I think they are something more personal. They are changes in consciousness that become visible through art.
This is why I think we misunderstand the creative process.
A novel may take ten years to write. We assume the story is difficult. I suspect something else is happening.
A book is the accumulation of countless moments of consciousness. Every sentence is written from the state of mind that existed when that sentence came into being. Those moments collect over months and years until they become a novel.
The difficult part is not always writing.
The difficult part is returning to the consciousness capable of writing the next page.
Every writer knows there are days when the work seems effortless. The sentences arrive almost as quickly as they can be typed. There are other days when the same writer stares at the same page for hours and produces nothing worth keeping.
The talent did not disappear overnight.
The consciousness did.
Or perhaps it simply moved somewhere else and needed time to return.
That is why artists disappear for years.
That is why one masterpiece follows another for some people while others spend a decade searching for the next sentence.
I think those years matter as much as the finished work because they become part of the finished work. Every interruption, every obsession, every disappointment, every joy eventually finds its way into the art. The audience may never recognize where it came from. The artist almost certainly does.
We often treat art as though it exists outside the artist.
I think the opposite is true.
Art never escapes the artist.
It cannot.
One consciousness cannot create from another consciousness. It can only create from itself. Everything it produces passes through its own memories, fears, ambitions, humor, disappointments, obsessions, and dreams. The finished work is the sum of those moments gathered together into a painting, a song, a screenplay, or a novel.
The audience then repeats the process.
We bring our own consciousness to the work.
That is why two people can stand before the same painting and leave believing they saw two different paintings. Neither interpretation is separate from the observer. Each interpretation tells us something about the person making it.
In that sense, criticism is also art.
It is another consciousness responding to the first.
Perhaps popularity works the same way.
Some works of art resonate because enough people recognize a familiar part of themselves inside the consciousness that produced them. They do not necessarily agree with the artist. They recognize something that already existed inside themselves.
That may even explain the culture we live in today. We ask why attention spans seem shorter. We ask why brief videos spread around the world while quieter work struggles to find an audience. I suspect that says as much about our collective consciousness as it does about technology. Every generation creates the art that resembles the way it thinks.
I have spent much of my life trying to understand why people believe what they believe. Becoming ill at a young age and later receiving a transplant changed the questions I asked. I began paying closer attention to the relationship between experience and consciousness. I noticed that the way we see the world becomes part of the world we inhabit. That observation followed me into literature, film, music, and painting.
Eventually I reached a simple conclusion.
Art is not separate from the artist.
It is the artist.
Captured for a moment.
Preserved beyond the moment.
That is why I have become less interested in asking what a work of art means and more interested in asking who the artist had become while creating it.
The painting is not only paint.
The novel is not only words.
The film is not only images.
They are the accumulated record of a consciousness passing through time.
Perhaps the first question we should ask when we encounter any work of art is not, “What does this mean?”
Perhaps it is, “What was the painter’s mood that day?”
