My yellowed copy
Forty years after my first reading, I decided to have another look at Susan Sontag's Against Interpretation. It's humbling to discover that ideas that I had come to believe were my own are actually hers. But my humbling was completely painless because this essay as well as "On Style", both in the same volume, are brilliant, important, and have lost none of their relevance. After the same forty years I also took another look at Clement Greenberg's "Avant-Garde and Kitsch”. Once again I found some of my own thinking, but it was balled up with a vague wistfulness for the ease of binary thinking. I’m no longer the young Formalist and Communist that I once was..
I don’t believe that Sontag or Greenberg gave me an epiphany that changed the way I looked at the world. Most likely, they just clearly articulated ideas that surrounded me as an art student in the 1970’s. The zeitgeist is a filter that encourages a particular set of ideas, and these essays were written well before they fell into my hands: The thoughts had been thought, the views had been seen, and they appeared perfectly obvious to me. I think today’s art students would be touched by Sontag, but either baffled or angry about Greenberg.
Nonetheless, it's worth the risk to read both persuasive and irritating things when you are young, or at any time in life really. I'm confident there were some irritated readers in 1939 when Greenberg published his essay. No one should be allowed to escape from art college without encountering these essays, and many other things, either obvious or annoying, besides.