Hello, thanks for listening to this Darma podcast. I hope you consider that in accordance with the Buddhist tradition all of my work as a teacher is offered without charge and supported entirely by donations only.

If you'd like to support this work you'll find a

PayPal button on darmopunks NYC.com. In 1966 a very important cultural icon, art critic, a very accomplished writer and philosopher

Susan Sontag wrote a piece called Against Interpretation. It was a wonderful, wonderful bit of art theory and it also had many ramifications beyond just the way we look at art.

Basically what Sontag spoke of is that in life there's a rush to interpretation. When we look at art, it is of course unsettling, especially

art that is not propaganda. When we look at complex work that is that doesn't have a sort of meaning or obvious

message to it in In other words, when it's challenging art, there's a temptation to,

as we stand in front of it to figure out what it all means, to interpret, to come up with an

underlying hidden message and in so doing when we try to reduce a really complex experience or event and summarize it with a message. She noted that we tend to kill

the experience. We tend to kill the power of the work itself and the way we interact with it, the real feelings, the visceral state of being confronted with a

you know, a duchamp or a scytople or whatever, I don't know who your favorite artists are,

you know, but you, when you see it, we have an opportunity either to immediately reduce it to some

kind of okay Duchamp was simply making a sort of neolistic statement about the world by engaging

in chance operations to Crete as art, or you can actually feel something emotional

and not try to reduce it to some kind of explanation.

Sontag wrote, analysis evacuates and destroys,

it digs behind the work to find a subtext which is the true one.

Manifest content must be probed and pushed aside to find the true meaning, the latent content.

Interpretation indicates a dissatisfaction with the work, IAMR, and a wish to replace it with something else.

And from the moment I read that, I mean, I first came across this piece about 35 years ago but it left an immediate

it really sunk in. It really

sunk in as like a really elegant pointing to something that I think is a

...