Against Interpretation
The text critiques the overemphasis on interpreting art's content, advocating for an appreciation of form and sensory experience, and suggesting a shift from content-driven analysis to a focus on art's immediate impact.
employees.csbsju.eduI went into Susan Sontag’s “Against Interpretation” thinking we would disagree, but her take is more nuanced. She’s against interpreting an artist’s intentions to make it fit your own narrative; but she’s for analysis of the thing itself (it’s form and the sensation it evokes). By the end, she pleas for a “dictionary of forms,” which feels like the
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What the overemphasis on the idea of content entails is the perennial, never consummated project of interpretation. And, conversely, it is the habit of approaching works of art in order to interpret them that sustains the fancy that there really is such a thing as the content of a work of art.
However obvious that may seem to us now, the fine arts were disembarrassed of eros through a series of distinctively modern philosophical and institutional developments. Chief among the philosophical developments was the consolidation of certain arts under the rubric of the fine or beaux (beautiful) arts and an understanding of the emerging paradig
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