Effective dialogue

In his blog, Brycen states, “...art has the ability to communicate emotions, feelings, and ideas to people or groups of people. To look at this from another angle, one can see that dialogue is vital in this expression. Dialogue makes something complete by conveying what the artist was feeling or felt to the people or the audience through their work of art...The artist can tell their deepest darkest fear to their most craziest dream through their work of art. This is important because some think that art being able to create ideas for the people viewing it creates dialogue between it and the audience because it causes them to think.”

On a recent trip to Gallery 51, I was also intrigued by this question of dialogue.  About a dozen different works were displayed throughout the gallery and, without the small three-by-five descriptions of them (whether they be from the artist of the gallery curators) I would have had either a completely different thought/emotion/feeling than the artist intended or absolutely no clue what I was viewing.   

This led me to question whether or not written words were necessary to a work in order to create not only a dialogue between artist and viewer, but an effective dialogue.  Looking at a sculpture that looked to me as if it could have simply been purchased in the home decor section at Target, I found out (upon reading the description) was actually supposed to communicate the play of light and shadow through the holes in the ironwork, just as ants playing in the sun...clearly NOWHERE near what I would think when I viewed it. 

Continuing around the gallery, I would try to come up with my own interpretation of the work; reading the three-by-fives, however, I found that I was not once in line with what the artist was trying to communicate.

My little art visit experiment here seems to have proven our point that art almost always requires some kind of verbal or written description of words in order to effectively spark a dialogue in which artists create and viewers interpret. Do you agree this is almost always the case?