How important is the "intention" of the artist in considering a piece a work of art?

I would say
"not very." A great artist often writes "in the zone," and all sorts of
unconscious impulses drive his or her art.

One of my favorite examples is the
example of Sophocles. The common interpretation now of Oedipus Rex is that
it portrays an unconscious collective fantasy shared by all young boys: they want to kill their
fathers and marry their mothers, just as Oedipus does in the play, but they repress that desire
to join the social order. Sophocles could not possibly have known about the Freudian unconscious
when he wrote the play thousands of years ago: somehow, he simply plugged...