If the purpose of art is to provoke, the positive messages festooning the Vineyard this week have met their objective.

For many, the eleven signs spouting love-oriented phrases are refreshing reminders that we need to be nicer to one another. And that appears to be one of the admirable goals of Julia Kidd, the West Tisbury artist who installed these signs across the Island landscape. “There is so much to love about you” and “I can’t get enough of you” are things most of us like to be told.

Yet reactions to message boards proclaiming some unspecified person’s love for us have been decidedly mixed. Who is saying this? Are the messages directed at me or to someone else? Or to all of us?

It is one thing to have a significant other or a friend or family member communicate personal feelings, but it can be quite another to come upon a ten-foot-wide sign in a field on State road telling you, “Oh what a treasure you are.”

If some are buoyed by the uplifting words, others feel their privacy has been slightly breached — not unlike the unsolicited approach of a Hare Krishna. No matter how well-intentioned, their advances can feel like violations of our space and psyche.

The two-week installation is reminiscent — on a much smaller scale — of the mega-projects by the artist Christo, who has wrapped buildings and islands all over the world in paper and fabric and placed more than 7,000 gates in Central Park and 1,700 umbrellas on the West Coast and in Japan. We admire the scale and creativity of these projects, even as they draw a range of reactions.

In the same way, Ms. Kidd’s quirky and ambitious project has succeeded in making us think about unconditional love — if not all in quite the same way.