Just to reduce my response to a simple question, I'd like to know if we are defining depth as there being multiple layers of meaning to peel back, if intent is required for something to have depth?
This is a good clarifying question. I will say:
mostly, yes. I say "mostly" because I think something where a layer of meaning was merely
obscured would meet the criteria I'm presenting. The only two things I feel are crucial for my (perhaps idiosyncratic) definition are that the meaning in question cannot be a) surface level or b) noticed or created only by the recipient.
I think there are lots of works of art, especially in situations where we cannot directly get answers from the artist about what their intent was, where very convincing and scholarly and valuable things have been written on elements or interpretations that are completely at odds with what the intent of the artist was.
Agreed. But I incline towards putting that to the credit of those scholars more than the work itself, and it's one of the reasons I think of criticism as an art form unto itself.
I think situations where the author has died or never spoken about it present interesting topics of conversation where reasonable people can disagree about this kind of depth, of course.
As an example, if we can definitively prove that all of the previous interpretations of what Rosebud means in Citizen Kane are proven to be incorrect, that they were never the intentions of Welles (that Rosebud was exclusively meant as nothing but an inside joke about Hearsts pet name for his wife's genitals), does whatever depth these interpretations have spoken of suddenly become completely irrelevant or at least considerably less relevant?
Depends on what the question is. They definitely do not become irrelevant for the purposes of evaluating quality. I don't think they matter much for the discrete purpose of evaluating depth (again, the way I'm using the term, which no one else is obligated to mirror, but obviously we're talking about the concept and not the word choice).
At what point can we discard intent? Are we beholden to it, if it is known? Would it be fruitless to find deeper meaning in something if it can be proven to not really be there?
Depends on what the question is. If we're just talking about value, certainly not. If we're evaluating the author and the depth of their work, then I do care about those things. Mostly because I'm using intended depth as a predictor of future depth, which for me correlates with interest level more than the incidental/unintended kind.
I like the feeling of someone hiding a thing for me to find. I feel intensely connected to the creator when that happens. There's something magical about a creator leading your neurons down the exact same path as theirs. It reminds me of little easter eggs in video games where you try to "break" something in the game only to find the developer expected you might and put something there for you to find when you did.
Or, rather, I guess I'll reduce my response to quite a few not so easy questions.
Yeah, this post was lousy with scope creep.