It is often said that great works of art are —inexhaustible—— capable, as Stanley Olson put it, of —endless interpretation. But Lubin, the Charlotte C. Weber Professor of Art at Wake Forest University, demonstrates in painful if inadvertently hilarious detail that this does not mean that works of art are immune from - that they are not in fact often subject to— wild and perverse misinterpretation.

I'm just a soul whose intentions are good,'— he sang to the crabs and the spiders and the palmetto beetles and the lizards and the night. ——Oh lord, please don't let me be misunderstood.

When most of the greatest individuals in history were misunderstood and you've spent so much of your own adult life misunderstood, you can't help but believe that the majority of people know very little worth knowing.