“To interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world - in order to set up a shadow world of “meanings”. It is to turn the world into this world (“This world!” As if there were any other.)

“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, conformable”

“It is always the case that interpretation of this type indicates a dissatisfaction (conscious or unconscious) with the work, a wish to replace it by something else.”

“Interpretation, based on the highly dubious theory that a work of art is composed of items or content, violates art. It makes art into an article for use, for arrangement into a mental scheme of categories”

“The fact that films have not been overrun my interpreters is in part due simply to the newness of cinema as an art. It also owes to the happy accident that films for such a long time were just movies; in other words, that they were understood to be part of mass, as opposed to high, culture, and were left alone by most people with minds”

“What is needed first, is more attention to form in art. If excessive stress on content provokes the arrogance of interpretation, more extended and more thorough descriptions of form would silence.”

“Interpretation takes the sensory experience of the work of art for granted, and proceeds from there. This cannot be taken for granted, now. Think of the sheer multiplication of works of art available to every one of us, superadded to the conflicting tastes and odours and signs of the urban environment that bombard our senses. Ours is a culture based on excess, on overproduction; the result is a steady loss of sharpness in our sensory experience. All the conditions of modern life - its material plenitude, its sheer crowdedness - conjoin to dull or sensory faculties”

“What is important now is to recover our senses. We must learn to see more, to hear more, to feel more.”

“Our task is not to find the maximum amount of content in a work of art, much less squeeze more content out of the work that is already there. Our task is to cut back content so that we can see the thing at all”

“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”

“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”

• “Review” art in relation to life. Don’t rate art. Connect it to memories, life experiences. Art reviews should resemble a story. A diary. A letter.

On Style

“There are no style-less works of art, only works of art belonging to different, more or less complex stylistic traditions and conventions”

” “Stylization” in a work of art, as distinct from style, reflects an ambivalence (affection contradicted by contempt, obsession contradicted by irony) towards the subject-matter. The ambivalence is handled by maintaining, through the rhetorical overlay that is stylization, a special distance from the subject. But the common result is that either the work of art is excessively narrow and repetitive, or else the different parts seem unhinged”

“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”

“Art is connected to morality, I should argue. One way that it is so connected is that art may yield moral pleasure; but the moral pleasure peculiar to art is not the pleasure of approving of acts or disapproving of them. The moral pleasure in art, as well as the moral service that art performs, consists in the intelligent gratification of consciousness”

“Pornography has a “content” and is designed to make us connect (with disgust, desire) with that content. It is a substitute for life. But art does not excite; or, if it does, the excitation is appeased, within the terms of the aesthetic experience. All great art induces contemplation, a dynamic contemplation”

“Genet has recently said that he now thinks that if his books arouse readers sexually, “they’re badly written, because the poetic emotion should be so strong that no reader is moved sexually. Insofar as my books are pornographic, I don’t reject them. I simply say that I lack grace”

“I have several times applied to the work of art the metaphor of a mode of nourishment. To become involved with a work of art entails, to be sure, the experience of detaching oneself from the world. But the work of art itself is also a vibrant, magical, and exemplary object which returns us to the world in some way more open and enriched”

• Art is transformational and requires a mode of thinking outside the confines of routine life. To be both experienced and created.

“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”

“consciousness - what used to be called, rather tendentiously, the faculty of contemplation - can be, and is, wider and more various than action. It has its nourishment, art and speculative thought, activities which can be described either as self-justifying or in no need of justification. What a work of art does is to make us see or comprehend something singular, not judge or generalize”

“as artifice and as living form of consciousness, as the overcoming of supplementing of reality and as the making explicit of forms of encountering reality, as autonomous individual creation and as as dependent historical phenomenon”

“Art is the objectifying of the will in a thing or performance, and the provoking or arousing of the will. From the point of view of the artist, it is the objectifying of a volition; from the point of view of the spectator, it is the creation of an imaginary decor for the will”

“Style is the principle of decision in a work of art, the signature of the artists will. And as the human will is capable of an indefinite number of stances, there are an indefinite number of possible styles for works of art”

• To copy another style is to branch off the subconscious of someone else and to infuse it with yours in small ways. Everything is a remix, but some things truly are one of a kind and there is the possibility to not be inspired consciously, but to embrace your own deep subconscious without listing inspirations or thinking about them. Make from deep within.

“If art is the supreme game which the will plays with itself, “style” consists of the set of rules by which this game is played. And rules are always, finally, and artificial and arbitrary limit”

“When Aristotle said that poetry was more philosophical than history, he was justified insofar as he wanted to rescue poetry, that is, the arts, from being conceived as a type of factual, particular, descriptive statement. But what he said was misleading insofar as it suggests that art supplies something like what philosophy gives us: an argument. ”

“…The metaphor of the work of art as an “argument”, with premises and entailments, has informed most criticism since. 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 it could well have been otherwise

“The most attractive works of art are those which give us the illusion that the artist had no alternatives, so wholly centered is he in his style. Compare that which is forced, laboured, synthetic in the construction of Madame Bovary and Ulysses with the ease and harmony of such equally ambitious works as Les Liaisons Dangereuses and Kafkas Metaporphosis. The first two books I mentioned are great indeed But the greatest art seems secreted, not constructed”

• Secreted! Love the use of that word. The full form of a piece of art comes slowly. Comes with patience. The process cannot be rushed. Can not be overthought and overplanned. My best work come when I treat it like an open canvas and go into the creation like improv. I sit on it, let it sink in. Come back to another improv session. It’s a sloow necessary process. Two years of this on TORI so far…

“Whenever speech or movement or behaviour or objects exhibit a certain deviation from the most direct, useful, insensible mode of expression or being in the world, we may look at them as having a “style”, and being both autonomous and exemplary”

“the greater interestingness of one work of art over another does not rest on the greatest number of things the stylistic decisions in that work allow us to attend to, but rather on the intensity and authority and wisdom of that attention however its focus”

• Design by subtraction. Less is more. Depth over breadth.

“In the strictest sense, all the contents of consciousness are ineffable. Even the simplest sensation is, in its totality, indescribable. Every work of art, therefore, needs to be understood not only as something rendered, but also as a certain handling of the ineffable. In the greatest art, one is always aware of things that cannot be said (rules of “decorum”), of the contradiction between expression and the presence of the inexpressible. Stylistic devices are also techniques of avoidance. The most potent elements in a work of art are, often its silences - YES YES YES

On Camp

“In naive, or pure, Camp, the essential element is seriousness, a seriousness that fails. Of course, not all seriousness that fails can be redeemed as Camp. Only that which has the proper mixture of the exaggerated, the fantastic, the passionate, and the naive.”

“When something is just bad (rather than Camp), it’s often because it is too mediocre in its ambition. The artist hasn’t attempted to do anything really outlandish. (“it’s too much”, “it’s too fantastic”, “it’s not to be believed”, are standard phrases of Camp enthusiasm)”

“A work can come closet to camp, but not make it, because it succeeds. Eisensteign’s films are seldom camp because, despite all exaggeration, they do succeed (dramatically) without surplus. If they were a little more “off”, they could be great camp - particularly Ivan the Terrible I and II”

“What is extravagant in an inconsistent or an unpassionate way is not Camp. Neither can anything be camp that does not seem to spring from the irrepressible, a virtually uncontrolled sensibility. Without passion, one gets psuedo-Camp - what is merely decorative, safe, in a word, chic.”

“There is Camp in such bad movies as The Prodigal and Samson and Delilah, the series of Italian color spectacles featuring the super-hero Maciste, numerous Japanese science-fiction films (Rodan, The Mysterians, The H-Man) because, in their relative unpretentiousness and vulgarity, they are more extreme and irresponsible in their fantasy - and therefore touching and quite enjoyable”

“Camp taste turns its back on the good-bad axis of ordinary aesthetic judgement. Camp doesn’t reverse things. It doesn’t argue that the good is bad, or the bad is good. What it does is to offer for art (and life) a different - a supplementary - set of standards”

“there are other creative sensibilities besides the seriousness (both tragic and comic) of high culture and of the high style of evaluating people. And one cheats oneself, as a human being, if one has respect only for the style of high culture, whatever else one may do or feel on the sly”

“Something is good not because it is achieved, but because another kind of truth about the human situation, another experience of what it is to be human - in short, another valid sensibility - is being revealed. And third among the great creative sensibilities is Camp: the sensibility of failed seriousness, of the theatricalization of experience. Camp refuses both the harmonies of traditional seriousness, and the risks of fully identifying with extreme states of feeling”

“Camp is the consistently aesthetic experience of the world. It incarnates a victory of “style” over “content”, “aesthetics” over “morality”, of irony over tragedy”

“The whole point of Camp is to dethrone the serious. Camp is playful, anti-serious. More precisely, Camp involves a new, more complex relation to “the serious”. One can be serious about the frivolous, frivolous about the serious”

“One is drawn to Camp when one realizes that “sincerity” is not enough. Sincerity can be simple philistinism, intellectual narrowness”

“Camp is the answer to problem: how to be dandy in the age of mass culture”

“Camp is a solvent of morality. It neutralizes moral indignation, sponsors playfulness”

“Camp asserts that good taste is not simply good taste; that there exists, indeed, a good taste of bad taste”

“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

“Camp taste is, above all, a mode of enjoyment, of appreciation - not judgement. Camp is generous. It wants to enjoy. It only seems like malice, cynicism. (Or, if it is cynicism, it’s not a ruthless but a sweet cynicism). Camp taste doesn’t propose that it is in bad taste to be serious; it doesn’t sneer at someone who succeeds in being seriously dramatic. What it does is to find the success in certain passionate failures”

“Camp taste is a kind of love, love for human nature. It relishes, rather than judges, the little triumphs and awkward intensities of “character” … Camp taste identifies with what it is enjoying. People who share this sensibility are not laughing at the thing they label as “a camp”, they’re enjoying it. Camp is a tender feeling”

• pop art is compared as something that embodies a similar attitude but is seen by Sontag as more flat, dry, serious, detached, and nihilistic