CONCEPT
Erotics of Art
Sontag's call for a mode of engagement with artworks that attends to form, surface, and sensory experience before extracting meaning — valuing the encounter itself over the content that can be carried away.
The phrase "an erotics of art" appears at the conclusion of Sontag's "Against Interpretation" as a replacement for the hermeneutical approach she had spent the essay dismantling. An erotics of art is not anti-intellectual; it is a redirection of intellect away from the extraction of meaning and toward sustained formal attention. The term erotics signals a relational mode: the viewer or reader enters a relationship with the work, attending to its specific formal properties, its surface textures, its resistance to paraphrase. This is contrasted with hermeneutics, the discipline of interpretation that treats the work as a container for meaning that must be opened, decoded, and translated into something other than itself. For AI-augmented work, the distinction becomes operational: the builder practicing an erotics of AI collaboration treats machine outputs as material to be engaged, questioned, and reshaped, while the builder practicing hermeneutics treats outputs as delivered meanings to be accepted or rejected.
