The question is, why let art off the interpretive hook? Or, put another way, who gets to decide what is interpretation and what is engagement? What if interpretation is a form of celebration? What if interpretation is always already a mode of creation?įor the past several years, these questions and many others have come to dominate my daily thinking as I have been deeply mired in the work of Cy Twombly (1928–2011), a revolutionary artist about whom the question of content continues to swirl.

But the scholarly part of my brain, which is also the part that teaches other humans, and that lives in twenty-first-century America, is persuaded by the notion of content, especially in texts that are not officially “art,” like a note from my son’s teacher, a president’s comments during a speech, a recipe for chili, a comment on Twitter, a flyer in my local coffee shop about Breonna Taylor, or a message from the Center for Disease Control.

We are just trying to make a thing and create an experience. As artists, we do not know what we are doing. The poet side of my brain intuits that Sontag is correct: content is illusory, along with the myth of authorial intent. And I still don’t know if I agree or disagree with it. This sentence from Susan Sontag has been knocking around in my head for probably thirty years. Interpretation, based on the highly dubious theory that a work of art is composed of items of content, violates art.

Speak to Me Words by Dean Rader