“Interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art.
Even more.
It is the revenge of the intellect upon the world.
To interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world — in order to set up a shadow world of ‘meanings’. “
– Susan Sontag
Susan Sontag’s seminal essay “Against Interpretation” was published in 1964
In this essay, she critiques the dominance of interpretation in modern culture, especially in art and literature, and calls for a more sensuous, immediate experience of artworks.
Sontag argues that interpretation imposes meaning on art, diluting its impact.
In classical criticism, both form and content were considered. But modern interpretation often reduces artworks to content such as symbolism, allegory and motif etc ignoring form, which for Sontag is where much of the art’s power lies.
Sontag rubbishes the idea that the primary role of criticism is to explain or decode meaning.
For her, it diminishes the direct experience of art.
Instead, she champions attentiveness to how a work expresses itself—its style, tone, form, and surface—rather than just what it means.
Feeling > Meaning
hashtag#SusanSontag hashtag#Art hashtag#content hashtag#meaning hashtag#hermeneutics hashtag#aesthetics hashtag#emotion
hashtag#PaulRicoeur hashtag#JürgenHabermas
