Select Quotes
Part I
Against Interpretation
It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances. The mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible. OSCAR WILDE, in a letter – Page 3
The earliest theory of art, that of the Greek philosophers, proposed that art was mimesis, imitation of reality. – Page 3
Even in modern times, when most artists and critics have discarded the theory of art as representation of an outer reality in favor of the theory of art as subjective expression, the main feature of the mimetic theory persists. Whether we conceive of the work of art on the model of a picture (art as a picture of reality) or on the model of a statement (art as the statement of the artist), content still comes first. The content may have changed. It may now be less figurative, less lucidly realistic. But it is still assumed that a work of art is its content. Or, as it’s usually put today, that a work of art by definition says something. (“ What X is saying is…,” “What X is trying to say is…,” “What X said is…” etc., etc.) – Page 4
None of us can ever retrieve that innocence before all theory when art knew no need to justify itself, when one did not ask of a work of art what it said because one knew (or thought one knew) what it did. – Page 4
What the overemphasis on the idea of content entails is the perennial, never consummated project of interpretation. – Page 5
Directed to art, interpretation means plucking a set of elements (the X, the Y, the Z, and so forth) from the whole work. The task of interpretation is virtually one of translation. – Page 5
Interpretation thus presupposes a discrepancy between the clear meaning of the text and the demands of (later) readers. It seeks to resolve that discrepancy. The situation is that for some reason a text has become unacceptable; yet it cannot be discarded. Interpretation is a radical strategy for conserving an old text, which is thought too precious to repudiate, by revamping it. – Page 6
The modern style of interpretation excavates, and as it excavates, destroys; it digs “behind” the text, to find a sub-text which is the true one. – Page 6
According to Marx and Freud, these events only seem to be intelligible. Actually, they have no meaning without interpretation. To understand is to interpret. And to interpret is to restate the phenomenon, in effect to find an equivalent for it. – Page 7
most modern instances, interpretation amounts to the philistine refusal to leave the work of art alone. 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. – Page 8
For decades now, literary critics have understood it to be their task to translate the elements of the poem or play or novel or story into something else. – Page 8
Pop Art works by the opposite means to the same result; using a content so blatant, so “what it is,” it, too, ends by being uninterpretable. – Page 10
To the extent that novels and plays (in America), unlike poetry and painting and music, don’t reflect any interesting concern with changes in their form, these arts remain prone to assault by interpretation. – Page 11
Ideally, it is possible to elude the interpreters in another way, by making works of art whose surface is so unified and clean, whose momentum is so rapid, whose address is so direct that the work can be … just what it is. Is this possible now? It does happen in films, I believe. This is why cinema is the most alive, the most exciting, the most important of all art forms right now. Perhaps the way one tells how alive a particular art form is, is by the latitude it gives for making mistakes in it, and still being good. – Page 11
In good films, there is always a directness that entirely frees us from the itch to interpret. – Page 11
They can be. The question is how. What would criticism look like that would serve the work of art, not usurp its place? What is needed, first, is more attention to form in art. – Page 12
Transparence means experiencing the luminousness of the thing in itself, of things being what they are. – Page 13
Once upon a time (say, for Dante), it must have been a revolutionary and creative move to design works of art so that they might be experienced on several levels. Now it is not. It reinforces the principle of redundancy that is the principal affliction of modern life. – Page 13
What we decidedly do not need now is further to assimilate Art into Thought, or (worse yet) Art into Culture. – Page 13
Ours is a culture based on excess, on overproduction; the result is a steady loss of sharpness in our sensory experience. – Page 13
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. – Page 14
On Style
In fact, to talk about the style of a particular novel or poem at all as a “style,” without implying, whether one wishes to or not, that style is merely decorative, accessory, is extremely hard. – Page 16
Contemporary writers and other artists with a style that is intricate, hermetic, demanding—not to speak of “beautiful”—get their ration of unstinting praise. Still, it is clear that such a style is often felt to be a form of insincerity: evidence of the artist’s intrusion upon his materials, which should be allowed to deliver themselves in a pure state. – Page 16
What Roland Barthes calls “the zero degree of writing” is, precisely by being anti-metaphorical and dehumanized, as selective and artificial as any traditional style of writing. – Page 17
Style is not quantitative, any more than it is superadded. – Page 17
Indeed, practically all metaphors for style amount to placing matter on the inside, style on the outside. It would be more to the point to reverse the metaphor. The matter, the subject, is on the outside; the style is on the inside. As Cocteau writes: “Decorative style has never existed. Style is the soul, and unfortunately with us the soul assumes the form of the body.” Even if one were to define style as the manner of our appearing, this by no means necessarily entails an opposition between a style that one assumes and one’s “true” being. In fact, such a disjunction is extremely rare. In almost every case, our manner of appearing is our manner of being. The mask is the face. – Page 17
It is not only that styles belong to a time and a place; and that our perception of the style of a given work of art is always charged with an awareness of the work’s historicity, its place in a chronology. Further: the visibility of styles is itself a product of historical consciousness. Were it not for departures from, or experimentation with, previous artistic norms which are known to us, we could never recognize the profile of a new style. Still further: the very notion of “style” needs to be approached historically. Awareness of style as a problematic and isolable element in a work of art has emerged in the audience for art only at certain historical moments—as a front behind which other issues, ultimately ethical and political, are being debated. The notion of “having a style” is one of the solutions that has arisen, intermittently since the Renaissance, to the crises that have threatened old ideas of truth, of moral rectitude, and also of naturalness. – Page 18
“Stylization” is what is present in a work of art precisely when an artist does make the by no means inevitable distinction between matter and manner, theme and form. – Page 19
“Stylization” in a work of art, as distinct from style, reflects an ambivalence (affection contradicted by contempt, obsession contradicted by irony) – Page 20
They present information and evaluations. But their distinctive feature is that they give rise not to conceptual knowledge (which is the distinctive feature of discursive or scientific knowledge—e.g., philosophy, sociology, psychology, history) but to something like an excitation, a phenomenon of commitment, judgment in a state of thralldom or captivation. Which is to say that the knowledge we gain through art is an experience of the form or style of knowing something, rather than a knowledge of something (like a fact or a moral judgment) in itself. – Page 21
Inevitably, critics who regard works of art as statements will be wary of “style,” even as they pay lip service to “imagination.” All that imagination really means for them, anyway, is the supersensitive rendering of “reality.” It is this “reality” snared by the work of art that they continue to focus on, rather than on the extent to which a work of art engages the mind in certain transformations. – Page 22
Behind the ambivalence toward style is, ultimately, the historic Western confusion about the relation between art and morality, the aesthetic and the ethical. – Page 22
For most people, as Ortega y Gasset has pointed out in The Dehumanization of Art, aesthetic pleasure is a state of mind essentially indistinguishable from their ordinary responses. By art, they understand a means through which they are brought in contact with interesting human affairs. When they grieve and rejoice at human destinies in a play or film or novel, it is not really different from grieving and rejoicing over such events in real life—except that the experience of human destinies in art contains less ambivalence, it is relatively disinterested, and it is free from painful consequences. – Page 23
Through Riefenstahl’s genius as a film-maker, the “content” has—let us even assume, against her intentions—come to play a purely formal role. A work of art, so far as it is a work of art, cannot—whatever the artist’s personal intentions—advocate anything at all. The greatest artists attain a sublime neutrality. Think of Homer and Shakespeare, from whom generations of scholars and critics have vainly labored to extract particular “views” about human nature, morality, and society. – Page 26
Approving or disapproving morally of what a work of art “says” is just as extraneous as becoming sexually excited by a work of art. – Page 26
However much the reader or listener or spectator is aroused by a provisional identification of what is in the work of art with real life, his ultimate reaction—so far as he is reacting to the work as a work of art—must be detached, restful, contemplative, emotionally free, beyond indignation and approval. – Page 27
And the world is, ultimately, an aesthetic phenomenon. That is to say, the world (all there is) cannot, ultimately, be justified. Justification is an operation of the mind which can be performed only when we consider one part of the world in relation to another—not when we consider all there is. – Page 28
It is the same with our own lives. If we see them from the outside, as the influence and popular dissemination of the social sciences and psychiatry has persuaded more and more people to do, we view ourselves as instances of generalities, and in so doing become profoundly and painfully alienated from our own experience and our humanity. – Page 29
As William Earle has recently noted, if Hamlet is “about” anything, it is about Hamlet, his particular situation, not about the human condition. A work of art is a kind of showing or recording or witnessing which gives palpable form to consciousness; its object is to make something singular explicit. – Page 29
Usually critics who want to praise a work of art feel compelled to demonstrate that each part is justified, that it could not be other than it is. And every artist, when it comes to his own work, remembering the role of chance, fatigue, external distractions, knows what the critic says to be a lie, knows that it could well have been otherwise. The sense of inevitability that a great work of art projects is not made up of the inevitability or necessity of its parts, but of the whole. – Page 33
Part V
Notes On “Camp”
For no one who wholeheartedly shares in a given sensibility can analyze it; he can only, whatever his intention, exhibit it. To name a sensibility, to draw its contours and to recount its history, requires a deep sympathy modified by revulsion. – Page 276
To patronize the faculty of taste is to patronize oneself. For taste governs every free—as opposed to rote—human response. Nothing is more decisive. – Page 276
Clothes, furniture, all the elements of visual décor, for instance, make up a large part of Camp. For Camp art is often decorative art, emphasizing texture, sensuous surface, and style at the expense of content. – Page 278
Camp sees everything in quotation marks. – Page 280
In naïve, or pure, Camp, the essential element is seriousness, a seriousness that fails. – Page 283
Time liberates the work of art from moral relevance, delivering it over to the Camp sensibility.… Another effect: time contracts the sphere of banality. (Banality is, strictly speaking, always a category of the contemporary.) What was banal can, with the passage of time, become fantastic. – Page 285
Camp involves a new, more complex relation to “the serious.” One can be serious about the frivolous, frivolous about the serious. – Page 288
Camp—Dandyism in the age of mass culture—makes no distinction between the unique object and the mass-produced object. Camp taste transcends the nausea of the replica. – Page 289
vis-à-vis – Page 290
One Culture And The New Sensibility
in response to this new function (more felt than clearly articulated), artists have had to become self-conscious aestheticians: continually challenging their means, their materials and methods. Often, the conquest and exploitation of new materials and methods drawn from the world of “non-art”—for example, from industrial technology, from commercial processes and imagery, from purely private and subjective fantasies and dreams—seems to be the principal effort of many artists. – Page 296
The tendency, he remarks, is to upgrade the old environment into art form (thus Nature became a vessel of aesthetic and spiritual values in the new industrial environment) “while the new conditions are regarded as corrupt and degrading.” Typically, it is only certain artists in any given era who “have the resources and temerity to live in immediate contact with the environment of their age … That is why they may seem to be ‘ahead of their time’… More timid people prefer to accept the … previous environment’s values as the continuing reality of their time. – Page 299
Sensations, feelings, the abstract forms and styles of sensibility count. It is to these that contemporary art addresses itself. The basic unit for contemporary art is not the idea, but the analysis of and extension of sensations. (Or if it is an “idea,” it is about the form of sensibility.) – Page 300
Having one’s sensorium challenged or stretched hurts. The new serious music hurts one’s ears, the new painting does not graciously reward one’s sight, the new films and the few interesting new prose works do not go down easily. – Page 303
It does not mean the renunciation of all standards: there is plenty of stupid popular music, as well as inferior and pretentious “avant-garde” paintings, films, and music. The point is that there are new standards, new standards of beauty and style and taste. The new sensibility is defiantly pluralistic; it is dedicated both to an excruciating seriousness and to fun and wit and nostalgia. It is also extremely history-conscious; and the voracity of its enthusiasms (and of the supercession of these enthusiasms) is very high-speed and hectic. From the vantage point of this new sensibility, the beauty of a machine or of the solution to a mathematical problem, of a painting by Jasper Johns, of a film by Jean-Luc Godard, and of the personalities and music of the Beatles is equally accessible. – Page 303
Afterword: Thirty Years Later …
The radical change I’d made in my own life, a change embedded in my moving to New York, was that I was not going to settle for being an academic: I would pitch my tent outside the seductive, stony safety of the university world. – Page 308
The two poles of distinctively modern sentiment are nostalgia and utopia. Perhaps the most interesting characteristic of the time now labeled the Sixties was that there was so little nostalgia. In that sense, it was indeed a utopian moment. – Page 311
Now the very idea of the serious (and of the honorable) seems quaint, “unrealistic,” to most people, and when allowed—as an arbitrary decision of temperament—probably unhealthy, too. – Page 312