#interpretation

This philistinism of interpretation is more rife in literature than in any other art. 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. Sometimes a writer will be so uneasy before the naked power of his art that he will install within the work itself - albeit with a little shyness, a touch of the good taste of irony - the clear and explicit interpretation of it. Thomas Mann is an example of such an overcooperative author. In the case of more stubborn authors, the critic is only too happy to perform the job. ↗

— Susan Sontag

#allegory #criticism #art

Nothing is inanimate; what is the rest is our interpretation. ↗

— Dejan Stojanovic

#dejan-stojanovic #inanimate #inanimate-objects #interpretation #literature

All human knowledge takes the form of interpretation. ↗

— Walter Benjamin

#human #human knowledge #interpretation #knowledge #takes

I like to create the music I hear in my interior. As a conductor, you have the ability to squeeze the sounds and interpretation you asked for from 50 to 80 people. ↗

— Eberhard Weber

#asked #conductor #create #hear #i

To what a degree the same past can leave different marks - and especially admit of different interpretations. ↗

— Andre Gide

#degree #different #especially #interpretations #leave

I can't read music. Instead, I'd do stuff inside the piano, do harmonics and all kinds of crazy things. They used to put me in these annual piano contests down at Long Beach City College, and two years in a row, I won first prize - out of like 5,000 kids! The judges were like, 'Very interesting interpretation!' I thought I was playing it right. ↗

— Eddie Van Halen

#beach #city #college #contests #crazy

Art, to me, is the interpretation of the impression which nature makes upon the eye and brain. ↗

— Childe Hassam

#brain #eye #impression #interpretation #makes

I think the most insulting thing you can do to a director is to challenge when he or she is satisfied with your interpretation. ↗

— Dustin Hoffman

#director #i #i think #insulting #interpretation

There are no facts, only interpretations. ↗

— Friedrich Nietzsche

#interpretations #only

Today is such a time, when the project of interpretation is largely reactionary, stifling. Like the fumes of the automobile and of heavy industry which befoul the urban atmosphere, the effusion of interpretations of art today poisons our sensibilities. In a culture whose already classical dilemma is the hypertrophy of the intellect at the expense of energy and sensual capability, interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art. Even more. It is the revenge of the intellect upon the world. 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.) The world, our world, is depleted, impoverished enough. Away with all duplicates of it, until we again experience more immediately what we have. ↗

— Susan Sontag

#interpretation #art