On Ambiguity

From James K. A. Smith's recent book How to Inhabit Time:

"Artists help us best appreciate [the] fragile dynamism of creaturehood. This is no doubt true because art specializes in ambiguity and nuance. What is art but the practiced discipline of evoking but not pinning down? A film, a poem, a song can invite us into multiple states of mind, evoking conflicting emotions yet managing to hold them together so that we dwell in the world with an unspoken appreciation for its messiness and a newfound humility in the face of its complexity. Our mortality is fraught and the arts are a balm, not because they heal us of our mortality but because
they absolve us of the need to control, to fix, to escape." (105)  

Some Dynaxioms:

• The best art is that which has an inherent ambiguity, to where you're not really sure what the artist intended or how they got there. But the internet has removed the possibility of mystery.
• Ambiguity is always a good strategy. When people are compelled to seek clarity or certainty it ensures contemplation.
• Eternal ambiguity is certainly more interesting than eternal certainty.
• An algorithmic strategy for visual art (and music) is "confuse the foreground and background" or "add ambiguity", but would it know what that means? AI doesn't know what "meaning" is, whereas humans always have at least a vague sense of it. 
• What you want is an ambiguity that stops you in the tracks of your usual patterns of thinking.
• Metaphorical truth is really not an oxymoron. Metaphors are not truths; they are a means to Truth. If you remove the metaphor, and ambiguity remains, then you have not achieved Truth.
• In art, one thing you don't need to defend or explain is ambiguity.
• Cryptic messages often appear to be nonsense, whereas ambiguity hints at several possible meanings.
• Humans have a penchant for expecting beginnings, middles, and endings of things, and to associate everything in the universe with a human form. If we learned to live with ambiguity, someone would contend that God made ambiguity for a purpose. Of course everyone sometimes suspects that there is a force present, but whether it is 'intelligent' in the human sense is another story.