Interpreting Da Vinci

Today, I read a strange commentary in the forum section of the free newspaper "Today" . (Well, given my total disgust at the absence of integrity in Singapore's media as demonstrated in GE2006, it seems like I am spending more time reading the articles contributed by the public than what those so-called journalists who were ranked 140th in the world wrote and passed off as serious political analysis)

Essentially, this citizen was of the view that the DVC movie "poisoned" art because it severely affected the interpretation of the two great works of Da Vinci, "The Last Supper" and "Mona Lisa". Now this is a most strange statement to make for the citizen has implicitly assumed that he must have known the so-called "true" interpretation of the two paintings. Could it be that Da Vinci actually left a 300 page thick manual that explained his true intention and the true story as he weaved it into these 2 paintings? I hardly thought so. Even if Da Vinci really wrote a 300 page manual about how to understand his paintings, that might not dispel any disambiguity about the meaning of the painting. Texts after all need to be interpreted by the mind and that means different minds would read slightly different meanings in the text given our own prejudices, beliefs and knowledge. A good example is the most widely read book in the world; the Bible. I need not point out that for the same text, there are so many different interpretations leading eventually to different doctrines and different denominations in the same faith.

I recalled that when I was taking a poetry class in my university days, the lecturer presented two schools of thoughts (if that could be called so) on the interpretation of poetry. I have since forgotten the terms used to refer to these two schools of thoughts but basically, one school advocated that a piece of text or poetry has only one true meaning and that is the meaning intended by the author. The other school of thought argued that since the text is made up of language and symbols which belongs to the public domain, not even the author should have monopoly of its usage or meaning. In other words, there is no true meaning in a text, so long that the reader can satisfactorily prove a certain meaning, he is entitled to that interpretation.

These two arguments could seemingly be applied to all kinds of text, even text that is supposed to be construed with a "true" or "correct" meaning like a legal document but let's put that aside since this would easily take up one topic by itself and the last thing I want to do is to delve into postmodernism and deconstructivism (It just makes my head giddy and wonder why I should not kill myself so that I don't have to doubt everything).

As these two arguments apply to any work of art, I am personally more in favour of the school of thought (only slightly) that argues that ultimately, the interpretation lies in the reader. Granted that when an author composes a piece of poetry or draws on a piece of canvas he might have certain ideas in mind of what he is trying to convey but that should not limit our interpretation of the works. Is not the purpose of art to stimulate one to reflect or to look at things in a different light? Is not a piece of poetry that can be interpreted in two internally consistent ways more beautiful than one where the supposed meaning stands like a naked whore in front of you? If one agree with these 2 statements, then the DVC movie and book did no disservice to the 2 paintings as the concerned citizen argued. In fact after watching the movie, I am even more intrigued by the "Last Supper" painting; by the imaginative ways in which we can interprete the poses of the characters and also awed by how deliberately or otherwise of not painting in the chalice supposedly used by Jesus to drink that it could set off such a chain of thoughts. Given that a great piece of art would always be open to interpretation, I have little doubt that even without the DVC movie, there would be more than one way to appreciate the painting and none of this to warrant being villified as "poisoning" the arts.