The Essential Role of Ambiguity in Religious Art

NY - THE JEWISH WEEK
By Eric Herschthal

The Metropolitan Opera’s 1991 production of
"The Magic Flute," with sets by David Hockney

One thing that often turns people off from art is that they can’t figure out what it means. The lack of fixed meaning frustrates them. But the cultural critic Charles Rosen makes an important point about art’s essential ambiguity — its inherent lack of fixed meaning — in his astute new collection of essays, “Freedom and the Arts.” The history of how art has unsettled authority is long, so it should be no surprise that religious authorities in particular have often had a difficult relationship with it. [link]