In a place of hermeneutics we need an erotics of art.

  The western theories of art began with the notion of imitation(mimesis) of nature and reality, as simply perceived by us. The earliest philosophers like Plato failed to realise the value of art and were affixed to its purpose, which they did not find any. "After all what is the use of a representation of what we can see and experience", they said. To defend art, the idea that art is bifurcated into form and content came about.

Sontag points out that the problems delimited by the mimetic theory of art persists even in the modern thought about art as subjective expression. The question simply transforms into "what's the content of the art?, what does it mean?". Even if the previous question about purpose seemed obtuse, this question is patently common and even seems reasonable. Sontag fundamentally challenges the need for this question and the obligation for art to respond.

Whatever it may have been in the past, the idea of content is today mainly a hinderance, a nuisance, a subtle or not so subtle philistinism.

Why does art need to justify itself? Even if artistic developments move away from primarily being about content, the idea is still perpetuated by those within artistic circles like critics and enthusiasts. Films are the most pitiable victim of all - every review focusses on the "meaning" of the film, the supposed parallels, because god forbid a good movie not being allegorical. YouTube is filled with people interpreting movies, explaining movie endings^[1]. This task of interpretation is one usually of translation - that A is really B, that X is actually a homage to this great work Y.

This is act of interpretation is nothing new and has been continuing for thousands of years. Religious texts, myths and epics are still being reinterpreted to suit modern world; poems and classical texts are almost always allegorized away.

Interpretation is a radical strategy for conserving an old text, which is thought too precious to repudiate, by revamping it.

By interpreting, we are actually altering the art without physically doing anything to it. We crave to make art intelligible to us until it becomes onerous or insensitive to contemporary practices. In our modern age, we are still not satisfied with one intelligible explanation - we wish to find sub-text pushing aside the supposed content to find the latent truer content. Hermeneutics propagates the stilted idea that to understand is to interpret, and to interpret is to restate the phenomenon in effect to find an equivalence for it.

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, comfortable.

Through interpretation we filter the art, discard aspects of it, avoid the response to what is actually presented. Maybe people want to extract more worth from the art because they invested resource for experiencing it. This is akin to the sunk-cost fallacy in economics. Indeed, modern artists have exploited this tendency of ours to produce works that can have multiple valid interpretations, or force us to realise the stupidity of our interpretation once we are done ravishing the work. Some good examples can be found in post-modernistic art work.

Sontag does call for inventing vocabulary and literature for art criticism itself; a new vocabulary that is more descriptive than prescriptive. Attention to the form in textual, aural, spatial, temporal and all other forms of art is in need. Art needs to be experienced more though our senses than understood. Truly, erotics for art is required.

This brilliant essay, in my opinion, one of the most important critiques of art. It does raise interesting afterthoughts - How does art analysis look bereft of interpretation? Is only form sufficient for art? Is art nothing but form? However, Sontag only provides some idealistic targets through examples without a detailed description about form. Is form and content clearly distinguishable? Can form be interpreted too? Can form be experienced in several levels?