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.
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Agalia Tan added
In a culture whose already classical dilemma is the hypertrophy of the intellect at the expense of energy and sensual capability, interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art.
Interpretation, based on the highly dubious theory that a work of art is composed of items of content, violates art. It makes art into an article for use, for arrangement into a mental scheme of categories.
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.
What a work of art does is to make us see or comprehend something singular, not judge or generalize.
I 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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