DaveNash3 commented on Against Interpretation and Other Essays by Susan Sontag
These are some quotes from the first two essays that stayed with me:
Against interpretation - In place of a hermeneutics, we need an erotics of art.
Transparence is the highest, most liberating value in art—and in criticism—today. Transparence means experiencing the luminousness of the thing in itself, of things being what they are.
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.
This reminded me of Frye who says the critic should be the broker between the artist and viewer. The role the critic is to show and not tell, which is like the role of any writer.
On Style - The antipathy to …
These are some quotes from the first two essays that stayed with me:
Against interpretation - In place of a hermeneutics, we need an erotics of art.
Transparence is the highest, most liberating value in art—and in criticism—today. Transparence means experiencing the luminousness of the thing in itself, of things being what they are.
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.
This reminded me of Frye who says the critic should be the broker between the artist and viewer. The role the critic is to show and not tell, which is like the role of any writer.
On Style - The antipathy to “style” is always an antipathy to a given style. There are no style-less works of art, only works of art belonging to different, more or less complex stylistic traditions and conventions.
What is inevitable in a work of art is the style. To the extent that work seems right, just, unimaginable otherwise (without loss or damage) what we are responding to is a qualify of its style.
Style has other functions besides that of being, in the extending sense that I have just indicated, a mnemonic device. For instance, every style decision embodies an epistemological decision, an interpretation of how and what we perceive.
What I really think about style is that critics do not have the vocabulary to talk about it. Fryre said something about this as well. An artist has many decisions about how to present something, and style helps narrow those decisions down. It provides certain conventions.
