This Vox article (via Kottke) is an excellent look at the power of art interpretation from your vantage point. I particularly connected with this quote:

“There’s an effort to create work that you don’t have to spend a lot of time thinking about,” the multidisciplinary artist Gregg Deal told me. Yet he believes that critical thinking is vital to any art, on the part of both the artist and the viewer.

“In school, we learn how to interact with poetry or art in a similar way that we learn to dissect frogs. We identify all of the pieces and we take them apart,” Ovenden says. In her work as a coach, she tries to get people to consider what comes after that dissection. “We don’t learn what we do once it’s all pulled apart. We kind of just move on.” It’s in the process of putting the world back together that Ovenden believes the relationship between a viewer and a work is formed.

It reminds me of what my teacher Sh. Hassan once imparted on me about flowers:

Sometimes, when we are presented with the beauty of a flower, we are so eager to dissect the petals, stems, and leaves to try to understand how the beauty came to be. Inevitably through our poking and prodding, the flower is broken down, left to pieces, and no longer can be put back together. So enjoy the fragrance, enjoy the view, take it in, and move on. Don’t linger and break it down.