Meaning in Art: Everything & Nothing

It's fun to argue about art, to opine strenuously about something that means everything and nothing at all. It's an evolutionary advancement, don't you think? I guess art was more meaningful during the days when all art was religious art, but then again people were willing to go to war over the conflicting meanings being represented. Art is still meaningful to varying degrees of course. Some contemporary art, mainly of the conceptual variety, actually privileges the meaningful part (that is, the political message part) over the meaningless part (that is, the aesthetic part), to its own detriment. The best art encourages viewers to impute meaning. Come to think of it, I never argue about the meaning of art, but rather the aesthetic part, or the extent to which the aesthetic part supports or advances the meaningful part. It's not worth fighting over meaning, which is an extension of thinking one even "knows" the meaning of a piece. The surest way to ruin a poem or a painting for students is to ask them figure out what the "correct" meaning of it is. Figuring isn’t engaging. This is not to say that a given work is meaningless, but the meaning of it isn't the most important part. It's the experience of it, which is of course subjective. It's good sport to debate subjectivities, but it's stupid to kill over them. The subjective dimension of life is everything when it comes to actually living life on a daily basis, but it better become nothing fast if you think it's calling you to hurt someone.