🏴Recently I read someone using your name to illustrate how wrong you were about Diane Arbus (who will also arrive some day, somewhere in this calendar). It grates the way you are used time and again to prove wrongness. If they read your introduction to the reprint of your 1960s collection of essays “Against Interpretation”, wherein you acknowledge you got it wrong from time to time, they’d realise that you got it wrong because you took critical risks, not like those yes-men that always get it right.

Every year I use your eponymous essay “Against Interpretation” as a perverse opening salvo in a module that fosters interpretation. Of course we could interpret your rallying cry against mining for content in the artwork as a wish, as a hope to escape your beautiful intellect for something bodily. Or we could go with Philippe Parenno’s advice in DAY 1 that “The idea is to read rather than to contemplate, to be active in front of the work.”🏴

📸Susan Sontag alone on a bed. N.Y.C. 1965. Photograph by Diane Arbus