I'll try to blurt out my sense of things briefly. It's formalist in that what a work actually is matters more than anything it supposedly says. So a work of art can't in some higher ideal sense mean anything more to anyone that what it actually does mean to them. There's no division between art and life. Art is a wholly owned subsidiary of life.

So, with no offense to Faulkner, art of itself can't mean something grand like "mankind is indestructible because of the will to freedom"--though it sounds good. We may endure and prevail, well and good, but we'll see.

Serious art can only speak with any authority to it's particular place in our lives, as representations we make. It may convince us of other things by analogy or as a microcosm of those things.

So, when you look at serious art, the most obvious and sensible questions are the ones it answers to. If you look at Hamlet, it's made of words and acting, and that's what it's about, without screwing around. First scene, the action is a guard takes the place of another. They look alike. The central issue in the story is Claudius taking his brother's place. The troupe of actors, whose job is to take the place of and resemble another, have been displaced in popularity by an upstart troupe. And so on, one thing taking the place of another, (my Invasion of The Bodysnatchers comparison links to this, Frosty the Snowman takes more explanation) til they're digging up the old bones to bury the new dead. All very logically constructed on it's concern with the nature of it's own process, and what it is to make art, to represent things with symbols. There's nothing mystical about it, it makes such sense it's almost obscured by simplicity. Lear for another example is about proportion.

It strikes me as clear that Stanley in A Streecar Named Desire asks if we've ever heard of a man named Shaw. Yes, and his sensibility as a playwright is in many ways opposed to Williams'. Shaw has no patience for the weak, and people in Shaw learn to be public people, not like those Tennessee Williams damaged wallflowers.

Shaw believed that beauty is a bi-product of other activity. So his stuff was "about" many things, but it's a respectable position that art that's too conciously self-involved gets prissy and gooey.

Anyway, what I don't take seriously, though I might enjoy it for fun, is stuff that has a message without much basis in it's own essential reality, the art of more or less entertaining blowhards like myself and most of us. Most of us aren't great, or very clear about what we do. In our stuff I dislike things that are egregiously hypocritical, like a sensational Oliver Stone movie about the "sensational media" or smug, self-indulgent wisdom where we laugh at people who aren't as good or wise as us. I liked American Beauty better in the reviews, the movie was a bit smugly fartsy for me. The omnicient dead-guy narration is a bit much. Those are my main rules for middle ground stuff.

A really serious artist believes, like Fox Mulder, or better, like agent Scully, of the X-Files, not that The Truth Is Out There, but something more like There's A Way Things Are.