What is art? How do we make it? What does it mean to see it, hear it, experience it? And who does it really belong to—the artist, the audience, or something else entirely?

In this particularly pretentious and confusing episode (your words, not mine), I turn to existentialists of the past—like Martin Heidegger and Rollo May—to help untangle what art is supposed to mean, why it matters, and how it impacts those who encounter it.

Along the way, we’ll also wrestle with the question of who gets to interpret art, and how to protect ourselves from the more dangerous traps of biased meaning-making.