Intentionality

I want to explain something that I'm not writing about: film maker's intentions. And here I'm borrowing a page from art history.

Since the Renaissance, artists have been writers, too. Michelangelo wrote quite a bit.
Journalists (I mean newspaper journalists) have always been happy to get quotations from artists, especially with the advent of "shows" and "exhibitions" in the 19th century. They'd ask questions like, "What was your inspiration for this? Why does it look like that? What did you intend?"
Artists were always happy to promote their work and would give the best answers that they could, sometimes boring, sometimes pompous, and most times, elitist. Just after the turn of the 20th century, the Surrealists came along, and decided to play the game their own way: they would say the most outrageous things they could think of, they would lie, and they would deliberately mislead. The journalists were all too happy to oblige by taking it all down and printing it, and sometimes what was said would cause a sensation and everyone would buy more newspapers.
Serious historians, however, were horrified. They were used to self-serving liars but Surrealists were taking lies and turning them into something new and strange.
And what came out of this is: intentionality, for an art historian or an art critic, is a waste of time. The work of art is, among other things, the fact in front of you. What the artist says he thought or what he intended is at best, irrelevant, and at worst, deliberately misleading.

I'm not saying intentionality is not important. It's important in law ("Did you intend to steal that laptop or did you just forget you had it when you walked out of the store?) and it's important for Catholics ("the intention of sin" being just as bad as the sin itself) and I'm sure it's important somewhere in psychology, too.

But if you want to talk about art, you just don't have to deal with intentionality, and probably shouldn't deal with it.

Addendum - posted August 19:

OK - so I did not realise that this idea has a name, "The Intentional Fallacy", and that it's at least as old as an essay in 1946, and did not originate amongst art historians. Here's what wikipedia says:
Intentional fallacy, in literary criticism, addresses the assumption that the meaning intended by the author of a literary work is of primary importance. By characterizing this assumption as a "fallacy," a critic suggests that the author's intention is not important. The term is an important principle of New Criticism and was first used by W.K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley in their essay "The Intentional Fallacy" (1946 rev. 1954): "the design or intention of the author is neither available nor desirable as a standard for judging the success of a work of literary art."

I could not have said it better myself.