All Art Is Coded

What do you mean when you say that all art is "coded"?

That there are fixed unchanging relationships between the working elements present in any artwork and the specific meanings or interpretations they present to the observer?

I just don't understand how you can assert such a bold statement like, "All art is coded whether the artist is conscious of that or not". How do you know this? Who was it that discovered or proved this was the case?

If everything the artist produces, and everything the observer sees can be decoded and explained through a political lens, are you then implying that expressions made by an artist for which no code exists cannot therefore be regarded as art? Or do you think that there is no such thing as artistic originality because everything which exists has already been coded?

All just sounds a bit finite and closed and pointless to me if that is the case.

There is a limit to what can be coded because there is a limit to what language can speak about. Beyond that limit or boundary is the domain of the ineffable or the intangible. The space/arena where things can only be known through our consciousness directly experiencing them, because language and its heavy handed grasp on reality lacks sufficient subtlety to faithfully encode what is there.

My artist friend used to say that "everything has already been done" and that "there's no such thing as originality", and he did a good job of proving that point with his own work! He was just going through the motions. He brought his assumptions to life and made them real.

Even if everything is coded and nothing new exists anymore, you have to live life as though that simply isn't the case, and things that have never existed before can be brought into the world purely because we were able to conceive it. Thinking otherwise just leaves me with a sense that I'm pottering around a jail cell in circles.

I agree, I think that nearly anything can be looked at politically and the way they're looked at will vary from person to person.