I've read a few times this week the familiar refrain that art doesn't pose answers but asks questions. This may be posed as a response to seemingly didactic or polemical art, or requests that art be more readily decipherable, or reflections on art that is seen as a call upon the response to provide answers, or as a comeback to art that is read as offering the wrong answers or questions for what ever reasons.
But it's not my experience of much art, at least the art that interests me, that it asks questions. Art which asks questions supposes an answer - this is the return one gets in the binary that is proper to a question, and I'm not well inclined to reviews that reduce a relation to an artwork to the answer to a question supposed by an artwork, in so far as such an answer sticks. After all what more would need to be said if a question were really answered? What a conversation killer, what a dampener on desire. We can consider ourselves lucky that the answers rarely offer the satisfaction that they imagine they're aiming for. Art is a different kind of call for a response than a question, I think.
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