Art & Creativity Quote by Susan Sontag

Sontag is picking a fight with the kind of criticism that treats art like a coded memo waiting to be decoded. Her target is the midcentury reflex - Marxist, Freudian, academic, cocktail-party alike - to ask, almost automatically, What does it mean? and to answer by translating the work into a set of concepts that feel smarter, safer, and more portable than the work itself. In that translation, the art gets thinner. Interpretation becomes a way of domesticating intensity.

The rhetoric is deceptively plain: "more, rather than less, real" is a moral claim disguised as a technical one. Sontag argues that commentary should not replace the artwork with a meaning-summary; it should sharpen perception, restore texture, and make the encounter feel immediate. Her insistence that criticism show "how it is what it is" elevates form, surface, rhythm, and sensation - the stuff interpretation often steps over on its way to an idea. Even the slightly awkward phrasing ("even that it is what it is") is strategic: she is reasserting the artwork's stubborn existence against the critic's impulse to annex it.

Context matters. Writing in an era when cultural authority was increasingly professionalized, Sontag senses how criticism can become a status performance: to explain is to demonstrate mastery. She flips the hierarchy. The critic's job is not to conquer the work but to intensify our contact with it, "by analogy" with our own lives. Underneath is a larger suspicion: we are losing the ability to feel directly, and we use interpretation as a substitute for experience. Her call is less anti-intellectual than anti-evasive: stop hiding behind meanings; learn how to look.