When I was in college, we were in this class I took, asked to read an essay by a wonderful American

cultural critic named Susan Sontag, who was written in 1966, so it's now, it's actually 50 years since its publication.

It was called very, very, very important essay. It actually had a lot of repercussions in the world of art and cultural criticism.

And you might at first wonder why I'm going to give, I'm going to intro the talk with this, but I think it will become pretty apparent.

In this article, Susan Santak says that there's two kinds of ways we can look, ways we can

look at art. The first is what she calls the interpretive way. Interpretation is the kind of

awareness that tries to extract a concealed message from art.

It asks the question, what does this mean?

So sometimes when you look at a painting or you watch a movie, you might be wondering,

okay, what's the point? What's this trying to tell me? What's this trying to get across?

And in essence, we're translating a very rich experience into an idea. We're trying to extract meaning from experience. This

tendency to interpret limits the freedom of our subjective response and that it puts the

fundamental importance of our impressions and the way we feel looking at a piece of our aside and just ask that we try to make sense of it.

We try to figure out art like it's a puzzle, like it's got some underlying moral that we're supposed to come away from.

And it creates a certain degree of anxiety that maybe everybody else in the movie theater or looking at this painting gets it, you know, standing in front of a Mark Rothko or Jackson Pollack painting.

Maybe they see something that I don't maybe they know what this means.

The second form of looking at art she said is formalist and it's not a great label but the idea is that it simply looks at art in terms of what is my experience with this piece.

How do I take it in? how do I feel when I look at it, and how was this

piece formally put together in it of itself? So do we like the way the brush strokes? Do we like the composition? Do we like the

choice of colors? Everything we need to know looking at a piece of art is there. We don't need to extract anything hidden. There's nothing to figure out.

For instance, if you're interpreting a movie, you're trying to figure out what does aliens, I'm saying this for my friend Barthley, what does it mean?

What does aliens mean? You might, some people interpret aliens as an allegory about the Vietnam War.

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