QuoteProject
There is a deep question whether the possible meanings that emerge from an effort to explain the experience of art may not mask the real meanings of a work of art.
Jerome Bruner
ShareWTF𝕏

Interpretation

What this quote means

This quote suggests that trying to explain art may obscure its true essence and meaning.

Jerome Bruner's quote highlights the idea that analytical attempts to interpret art might disrupt our direct experience and understanding of it. Instead of uncovering deeper truths, these explanations can sometimes conceal the raw and authentic emotional impact that art is meant to convey. Art exists not just for intellectual analysis but for personal and emotional engagement, and any explanation that overshadows this can limit our appreciation of its true significance.

Themes

ArtInterpretationExperienceMeaningEmotion

In practice

Example use cases

In a discussion on art interpretation during a gallery exhibition.

More from Jerome Bruner

We are storytelling creatures, and as children we acquire language to tell those stories that we have inside us.
Jerome BrunerRead
The notion of multiple literacies recognized that there are many ways of being-and of becoming-literate, and that how literacy develops and how it is used depend on the particular social and cultural setting.
Jerome BrunerRead
The foundations of any subject may be taught to anybody at any age in some form.
Jerome BrunerRead
Organizing facts in terms of principles and ideas from which they may be inferred is the only known way of reducing the quick rate of loss of human memory.
Jerome BrunerRead
Teaching is the canny art of intellectual temptation
Jerome BrunerRead
Good teaching is forever being on the cutting edge of a child's competence.
Jerome BrunerRead

Similar quotes

Fashion is something barbarous, for it produces innovation without reason and imitation without benefit.
George SantayanaRead
To be a film-maker, you have to lead. You have to be psychotic in your desire to do something. People always like the easy route. You have to push very hard to get something unusual, something different.
Danny BoyleRead
What I wrote all the time when I was a kid - I don't want to call it 'poetry,' because it wasn't poetry. I was not that kind of a writer. I was a rhymer. I was a fan of Dorothy Parker's, so maybe I wrote poetry to that extent, but my main focus was the humor of it, and word construction, and the slant. Your words, it's a very powerful experience.
Carrie FisherRead
Who knows if the moon's / a balloon, coming out of a keen city / in the sky - filled with pretty people?
E. E. CummingsRead
Art is the concrete representation of our most subtle feelings.
Agnes MartinRead
I would that my photographs might be, not the coverage of a news event, but an indictment of war - the brutal corrupting viciousness of its doing to the minds and bodies of men; and, that my photographs might be a powerful emotional catalyst to the reasoning which would help this vile and criminal stupidity from beginning again.
W. Eugene SmithRead

A little wisdom, now and then

Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.