In Reading Louis Sontag’s Essay Entitled “Against Interpretation” The Reader Is

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Term Paper Title	In Reading Louis Sontag’s Essay Entitled “Against Interpretation” The Reader Is
# of Words	1141
# of Pages (250 words per page double spaced)	4.56

In reading Louis Sontag’s essay entitled “Against Interpretation” the reader is presented with the idea that in our current age, art, which in Sontag’s definition includes literature, film, and visual pieces such as paintings and sculptures, should not be interpreted or understood based on its latent content.  Sontag proposes that art should instead be viewed in light of its pure form, the “manifest content”.  Sontag’s view that art should be appreciated not for its deeper content but for its form fails to acknowledge the fact that many artists use their works as reflections of their personal beliefs, experiences, and feelings.  The realization of this underlying meaning to art is important to be able to fully understand and appreciate what the work is attempting to convey.  Whether watching a film, reading a novel, or looking at a painting, drawing, or sculpture, if the full meaning of the work is to be appreciated, then one must look beyond the surface and into the content.
Art can, depending on the viewer, be appreciated on two levels.  The first level is one of simple admiration.  This admiration is based solely on the appearance of a work or on how entertaining it is.  Appreciating art on only one level is not necessarily “wrong”, but it does not give the viewer the full potential effect of the art.  Sontag believes that the best way to experience art is in this one-dimensional approach.  This can not, however, be seen as appreciating or understanding art, merely as viewing art, sensory perception without thought processes.  Surely this is not the purpose of art.  An individual must see Art as what it is to them personally, not what its physical characteristics are.
The reason art, in particular painting and literature, has been so revered is because it is meant to be a way of being entertained while being “enriched” and “cultured”.  Art has been put on a pedestal even more so recently because of how it is seen as everything television is not.  While television numbs the mind and encourages people to not think, art is supposed to encourage creative thinking and intellectual stimulation.  To accomplish this though, something must go into the art in addition to what is taken from it.  Simply reading a novel or looking at a sculpture and saying, “That is nice” or “That was well written” does not enrich the mind any more than watching a mindless cartoon on television.  If we discourage children from watching television because it does not make them thin...

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