Quotes About Interpretation

To interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world—in order to set up a shadow world of "meanings.

To say a feeling, an impression is to diminish it - expel it

The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means.

Every style is a means of insisting on something.

A photograph is not only an image (as a painting is an image), an interpretation of the real; it is also a trace, something directly stenciled off the real, like a footprint or a death mask.

The function of writing is to explode one's subject—transform it into something else. (Writing is a series of transformations).

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.

La actitud realmente seria es aquella que interpreta el arte como un medio para lograr algo que quizá sólo se puede alcanzar cuando se abandona el arte

No sería erróneo hablar de una compulsión a fotografiar: a transformar la experiencia misma en una manera de ver.

El más lógico de los estetas del siglo XIX, Mallarmé, afirmó que en el mundo todo existe para culminar en un libro. Hoy todo existe para culminar en una fotografía.

No es del todo erróneo afirmar que no existe una mala fotografía, sino solo fotografías menos interesantes, menos relevantes, menos misteriosas.

I was thinking, Ursula said . . . that the difference between a story and a painting or photograph is that in a story you can write, He's still alive. But in a painting or a photo you can't show 'still.' You can just show him being live.

En lugar de una hermenéutica, necesitamos una erótica del arte.

Fotografiar es conferir importancia. Quizás no haya tema que no pueda ser embellecido; es más, no hay modo de suprimir la tendencia intrínseca de toda fotografía a dar valor a sus temas.

Strictly speaking, nothing that's said is true. (Though one can be the truth, one can't ever say it.)

muitos fotógrafos continuam a preferir imagens a preto e branco, pois consideram-nas mais delicadas e sóbrias do que a cor - ou menos voyeuristas e menos sentimentais ou cruamente miméticas.

What the overemphasis on the idea of content entails is the perennial, never consummated project of interpretation. And, conversely, it is the habit of approaching works of art in order to interpret them that sustains the fancy that there really is such a thing as the content of a work of art.

That most logical of nineteenth-century aesthetes, Mallarmé, said that everything in the world exists in order to end in a book. Today everything exists to end in a photograph.

Interpretation, based on the highly dubious theory that a work of art is composed of items of content, violates art.

Real art has the capacity to make us nervous. By reducing the work of art to its content and then interpreting that, one tames the work of art.

La fotografía en un libro es, obviamente, la imagen de una imagen.

interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art.

cada vez es menos factible reflexionar sobre nuestra experiencia siguiendo la distinción entre imágenes y cosas, entre copias y originales

Así como la pintura se ha vuelto cada vez más conceptual, la poesía se ha definido cada vez más por su interés en lo visual.