Tbh I just say they’re made up so that the creator can pretend that his work has more meaning to it than it actually does.
One of my history teachers once told me that he had an art class in college, and his final exam was a sculpture and a speech about its theme.
What he did was procrastinate until the day of the exam. He took a wooden pallet and broke off a bunch of the boards, put them in a little spiral, nailed them, and covered it in black paint. It looked awful. He came up with a speech 15 minutes before his exam started. It was about some flood that had happened in his Canadian hometown when he was a kid. And his professor was so overwhelmed with emotion that she gave him an A+.