Depends.

John Carpenter felt the need to explicitly state that They Live was about yuppie capitalism when the alt right was saying it was about Jews.

In Detroit: Become Human, David Cage didn’t see any parallels between the robots being forced to sit in the back of the bus and African Americans also being forced to do the same.

Then you have people like Kunihiko Ikuhara, who when asked a direct question about the meaning of his work, will give vague answers because he’d rather you figure it out for yourself.

I know you don’t want to hear “it depends,” but there is no one rule that would cover all art. Some art is made to communicate specific ideas. Some art is made simply out of self-expression, without intent for any particular audience. Both are valid.

If I doodle in my notebook, it’s for the artist (me.) However, I also draw and paint to communicate specific emotions. I made a painting while listening to “September” by Earth, Wind and Fire, with the intent to capture the energy and joy the song sends through me. I don’t expect anyone to immediately connect the image with the specific song, but since it’s a lively concert scene, my hope is that the emotion that inspired the art comes across to an audience.

Sometimes I’ll make something more abstract, intentionally left open to interpretation. I may have my own thoughts about such pieces, but ultimately I want the viewer to find their own meaning.

In reality, everything is up to the audience. There will always be people who interpret things in their own way, independent of the artist’s intentions. We can’t control what others will think, but learning to tolerate and/or accept people who “don’t get it” is a stage all artists have to go through. I’ve come to accept that there is no one perfect mode of communication, so if I intend to communicate something specific, it’s on me as the artist to put effort into making that message clear.

Death of the author, baby

Primarily the audience. The artist can approach a project with a certain set of ideas, precepts, and motivations, and attempt to communicate something, but the interpretations of the audience supercede that IMO.

That said, different levels of engagement inform different interpretations. For instance, there’re folks who watched Starship Troopers that didn’t understand it was satire until they listened to the director’s commentary. Knowing this does impact an audience’s interpretation when engaging with the work - all of a sudden, certain things lend themselves to closer consideration. But the audience still brings their own experiences, sociocultural context, and ideas to a work of art. Over time, it is the audience’s interpretations that carry on as people share that experience.

Ideally, a work stands on its own without reference to paratext/the creator’s claims. But those can play a part in informing your own interpretation.

Audience

Creator can also percieve it and be part of the audience

Both, but ultimately audience is more important since they are more numerous. Also there are works of art we seen with very little context know of their creation.

Yeah, definitely. Their interpretations may not completely match, but they’re both involved in it.

Can I say neither? I would argue that a creator can’t imbue their creation with an intrinsic meaning. I’d say that it can mean something to the creator, and it can mean something to the audience, but outside any observation it’s inherently meaningless.

The viewer, the artist can try as they might to convey a message, but it’s up to the audience to see it

Audience. It doesn’t matter what an artist intends if it is not perceived in that way. It’s up to the creator to make the audience perceive something.

The audience wins out over time.

Art is a message. It has a sender and a receiver. The sender aka the creator has an idea and their synapses create the piece of art. The receiver - even when privy to the thoughts of the creator because they talked or wrote about it etc. - consumes it and has a response. It could be along the lines the creator had intended but it doesn’t have to be. Both sides could be equally happy with their side of it while thinking completely different things.

So an artist can try to attach a certain meaning to their artwork but it is no guarantee the audience will see it that way. Is the person in Munch’s The Scream screaming themselves or holding their ears to block out screaming they hear? I read what the artist intended and I can tell you I thought the other thing.

So far I’ve been talking about a single artist and a single consumer. That’s not how this works. There could be a group who have differing ideas about the art they’re creating, like a song. So it means different things to different people on the sender side already.

It gets really messy on the receiver side because ideally the art will be consumed by hundreds and thousands of people. In that group you will have opinion leaders tastemakers and they in turn will influence other recipients. History also filters artworks. I don’t think Leo thought his postage stamp size portrait of a smirking Italian merchant’s wife would be the most famous painting in the world if experts hadn’t endorsed it, it hadn’t forcefully changed owners, hung in Napoleon’s apartment, was stolen and recovered. So there are biases built in and it isn’t as clean cut as saying everybody interprets it their own way in most circumstances.

Both, sorta.

Art is a form of communication. It is up to the author/artist to ensure the message they want to convey is both clear and understood to their target audience.

However, no matter how hard you try there will always be some who don’t interpret it as intended. These typically fall outside of the target audience, but their interpretation is still valid.

If the target audience still misinterprets, their interpretation is valid, but the artist did a poor job communicating their intention. This does not necessarily mean the art is bad though.

A work can have multiple meanings, even unintended meanings. It can even have no intended meaning.

Its creators define its intended meaning, if any. Valid interpretations can create other meaning from it.

Both. We can’t perceive the world exactly the same way as another person. Therefore, what we make of it is also individual and every point of view is valid in its own way.

Take a Rorschach-Test, for example. There are examples most people can agree on, they show a specific thing. Others are wildly subjective. What a creator intends to invoke with their creation and what the audience receives are not necessarily the same, but that doesn’t invalidate one side’s interpretation.