My Interpretation of: Against Interpretation by Susan Sontag

To begin, I felt that this article was a tough read and many of her comments about art I did not understand or I feel I do not know enough about art to comprehend. However, I do feel that her article was interesting and I was able to grasp some key points that I feel she was trying to portray.
Susan Sontag first talks about Plato and Aristotle giving their opinions about art. For Plato, “art is neither particularly useful, nor, in the strict sense true”. He considers art to mimetic objects and that even the best painting would be an imitation of an imitation. Aristotle feels that art has a central value and arouses dangerous emotions. Sontag then discusses interpretation and how when dealing with art, it meaning plucking a set of elements from the whole artwork. It basically is a translation. She feels that modern interpretation digs deeper then text and excavates meaning that intentional or not. I liked her example discussing Marienbad’s painting. She argues that the desire to interpret her art should be resisted; rather, what matters “is the pure, untranslatable, sensuous immediacy of some of its images, and its rigorous if narrow solutions to certain problems of cinematic form”.
A couple of definitions that I have learned from this article were abstract paintings and Pop Art. Abstract painting is the attempt to have no content meaning there can be no interpretation. Contrarily, Pop Art uses content so blatant making it interpretable. I also agree that more attention needs to be paid to the formation of art, not the interpretation. A descriptive, rather than prescriptive vocabulary for form is needed. Redundancy is what Susan Sontag feels is taking over modern life and is worried that we are too often assimilating Art into Thought or Art into Culture. She argues that we need to cut back content so that we can see the thing at all. We should be making works of art that are real to us and unique to us.