Art and Audience Respect

Compression and the Canvas

The greatest works of art respect their audience. They do not pander with pretext, subtext, or midi-text. They leave ambiguity intact, allowing the audience to project their psychology into the work, to wrestle with the text as it stands. This is the compression hidden layer of art—the emergent phenomenon where interpretation happens, where meaning unfolds not in the artist’s mind but in yours.

Great art is not an exposition. It is not a lecture, nor a manual. Shakespeare understood this better than anyone, compressing everything into the text and trusting the audience to figure it out—or to misfigure it out, as the case may be. When Hamlet hesitates, the reasons are myriad and unknowable, but that hesitation becomes a mirror. Is it your fear of death you see? Your indecision? Your resentment toward a hypocritical world? Shakespeare gives you no answers. He compresses, and in the void of ambiguity, you emerge. That is respect.

Contrast this with the mistakes of lesser creators. They over-explain. They drape their text in pretext, telling you why things happen instead of letting you ask why. Or worse, they layer it in subtext, as though every glance, every sigh, every pause must carry an agenda, an interpretation waiting to be spoon-fed. Pretext is the artist’s excuse; subtext is their secret. And neither belongs in the work. The audience doesn’t need your secrets. They need your text.

Take Woody Allen’s Annie Hall, for example. Here is a masterpiece built on the foundations of subtext, where Freudian psychoanalysis whispers in every line. It’s brilliant, but it’s also indulgent. Allen, inspired by Billy Wilder’s The Seven Year Itch, leans heavily into the subtextual mechanics, sometimes too heavily. Wilder, being of that German-Jewish, Freud-inflected intellectual world, handled subtext like a scalpel: clean, precise, suggestive. Allen, to his credit, made it funny, made it human. Yet for all their genius, one cannot help but feel that they took too much from the audience. They did the work for us. They did not compress enough.

Art is at its best when it trusts its audience to expand the compression. Music, film, literature, theater—all great art respects this principle. The compression hidden layer is the artist’s ultimate act of faith. It says, Here is the text. Now it is yours. When Tarantino remarks that the problem with TV is its obsession with backstories, he’s pointing to this very issue. TV has time to unpack every node in its network, every character, every subplot, until the ambiguity is gone and the canvas is no longer blank. This is why most TV shows don’t endure. They exhaust themselves. Every edge in the network is colored in; every node is labeled. There is nothing left to project onto. Film, by contrast, is forced to compress. At best, it might give you the protagonist’s backstory, but the rest is left open. The canvas remains.

Tarantino himself is a master of compression. Think of Pulp Fiction. Why does Vincent Vega go to Amsterdam? Why does Marcellus Wallace have that Band-Aid on the back of his neck? Why does the briefcase glow? You will never know—and that is precisely why the film endures. It respects you enough to let you wonder.

But this respect is not universal. Many artists fail. They cannot resist the urge to control. They cannot leave the ambiguity intact. They treat their audience like children, feeding them pretext to explain the plot, subtext to underline the themes, midi-text to bridge every gap. These works collapse under their own weight, leaving no room for emergence, no space for the audience to breathe.

The artist’s job is to compress, to give the audience a rich but ambiguous layer to project onto. In this sense, art is not unlike open science or open source: it invites collaboration, interpretation, innovation. The best art is a neural network with its weights left undefined, a canvas waiting for the audience to fill in the colors. Shakespeare understood this. So did Tarantino. The rest of us would do well to learn.