16 quotes
From now to the end of consciousness, we are stuck with the task of defending art.
Against Interpretation and Other Essays (1966)
Art today is a new kind of instrument, an instrument for modifying consciousness and organizing new modes of sensibility.
Against Interpretation and Other Essays (1966)
Interpretation is not (as most people assume) an absolute value, a gesture of mind situated in some timeless realm of capabilities.
Against Interpretation and Other Essays (1966)
The work of Kafka … has been subjected to a mass ravishment by no less than three armies of interpreters.
Against Interpretation and Other Essays (1966)
To interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world—in order to set up a shadow world of "meanings."
Against Interpretation and Other Essays (1966)
What is most beautiful in virile men is something feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine women is something masculine.
Against Interpretation and Other Essays (1966)
Interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art.
Against Interpretation and Other Essays (1966)
In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art.
Against Interpretation and Other Essays (1966)
Science fiction films are not about science. They are about disaster, which is one of the oldest subjects of art.
Against Interpretation and Other Essays (1966)
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.
Against Interpretation and Other Essays (1966)
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.
Against Interpretation and Other Essays (1966)
Real art has the capacity to make us nervous. By reducing the work of art to its content and then interpreting that, one tames the work of art. Interpretation makes art manageable, comformable.
Against Interpretation and Other Essays (1966)
What is important now is to recover our senses. We must learn to see more, to hear more, to feel more.
Against Interpretation and Other Essays (1966)
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.
Against Interpretation and Other Essays (1966)
Tennessee Williams’ forceful psychological melodrama now became intelligible: it was about something, about the decline of Western civilization. Apparently, were it to go on being a play about a handsome brute named Stanley Kowalski and a faded mangy belle named Blanche Du Bois, it would not be manageable.
Against Interpretation and Other Essays (1966)
The discovery of the good taste of bad taste can be very liberating. The man who insists on high and serious pleasures is depriving himself of pleasure; he continually restricts what he can enjoy; in the constant exercise of his good taste he will eventually price himself out of the market, so to speak. Here Camp taste supervenes upon good taste as a daring and witty hedonism. It makes the man of good taste cheerful, where before he ran the risk of being chronically frustrated. It is good for the digestion.
Against Interpretation and Other Essays (1966)