Our task is not to find the maximum amount of content in a work of art, much less to squeeze more content out of the work than is already there. Our task is to cut back content so that we can see the thing at all.
The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art—and, by analogy, our own experience—more, rather than less, real to us. The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means.
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In place of hermeneutics we need an erotics of art.
—Susan Sontag, “Against Interpretation” (1964)
1 comment:
From a great book you pick a great excerpt like Sappho finding the uppermost apple; a fine example of what Sontag writes, an "erotics of arts".
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