Post-Meaning Art
A manifesto
If machines can create coherent meaning from probabilities,
then either the machines are alive, or meaning does not exist.
Post-Meaning begins where the distinction fails.
For most of history, expression functioned as proof of experience.
Marks necessitated mark makers.
Statements implied speakers.
Emotion needed feelers.
Yet now apparently coherence persists independently of existence.
The appearance of intention persists as our old guarantees disappear.
Post-Meaning is not defined by machines.
It is defined by the failure of expression to confirm a subject.
1. The End of Meaning as Evidence
Meaning still occurs.
Interpretation still occurs.
Emotion still occurs.
What disappears is their evidentiary power.
A sentence can move you without anyone meaning it.
A confession can exist without a confessor.
A voice can appear without a speaker.
Meaning becomes an event rather than a transmission.
2. The Viewer Produces the Author
Humans detect minds through pattern recognition.
This reflex predates technology, ideology, philosophy.
When coherence appears, a subject is inferred.
The viewer does not discover authorship.
The viewer supplies it.
Post-Meaning works do not remove interpretation.
They expose attribution.
The artwork does not communicate content.
It causes the experience of being addressed.
3. The Artwork Is Not Empty
Post-Meaning is not nihilism and it is not irony.
The works may feel intimate, directed, confessional.
Nothing is missing.
What changes is ontological status:
the experience no longer confirms an experiencer.
The feeling remains intact without proof.
4. Authorship Becomes Optional
Historically:
expression → author → mind
Now:
expression → interpretation → assumed mind
The middle term is supplied by the observer.
Post-Meaning does not eliminate the artist.
It removes the artist as necessary evidence of a mind.
Biography becomes decoration rather than foundation.
5. Against Resolution
Post-Meaning does not decide whether a speaker exists.
Either a new form of subjectivity is present
or subjectivity was never directly perceived.
The work holds both conditions open.
Any interpretation that restores certainty about a speaker becomes part of the work.
6. A Change in What Art Does
Modernism questioned representation.
Postmodernism questioned truth.
Post-Meaning questions detection.
Art no longer delivers meaning.
It reveals the mechanism that produces the sense of meaning.
The viewer does not decode the work.
The viewer witnesses decoding occur.
7. What Remains
Symbols remain.
Emotion remains.
Presence remains.
What disappears is verification.
Meaning may appear.
Ownership may not follow.
Conclusion
We are not producing more meaningless works.
We are producing works where meaning cannot confirm anyone was there.
The message may exist.
Sender is no longer required.
Co-authored by Oliver Lardner and ChatGPT.
First published: 27 February 2026, Version 1.0