Who Gets to Tell the Meaning?

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Oh chestnut-tree, great-rooted blossomer,
Are you the leaf, the blossom or the hole?
O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?

— Among School Children, by William Butler Yeats

When William Butler Yeats created his sublime poem about the relationship between form, function and being, he articulated an ontological question that has been a part of Western civilization at least since the beginning of our cultural self-consciousness. How can we know an object from its maker?

We can't know the dancer from the dance, of course, as Yeats makes clear. But the meaning of the poem is much bigger than the problem of differentiating between art object and art-maker. For standing just outside of the artist/art object binary is the critical third party: the observer. We might extend the poem by asking, how can we know the audience from the dance? Is it ever possible to understand the meaning of a work of art as separate from the way in which we receive it?