I should say that I mean “interpret” in its most basic and narrow sense. Like how, when you see a traffic sign, your vision allows your mind to make a connection between the image and the concept. So that you understand what you are seeing, can act accordingly, and then move on and forget about it, almost within an instant. If you are in a museum, looking at a painting, you might move slower, bringing to bear the apparatus of your mind that makes moral and aesthetic judgments. (For paintings are more complex than traffic signs, their meanings more elusive, their moods palpable). But that is separate, I think, from what can happen next (or maybe before, it isn’t clear to me), which is that you are affected emotionally, or even feel as though some spiritual part of yourself has been roused. Which is analogous, I think, to what Susan Sontag was trying to impress on us in her essay from 1966, Against Interpretation, where she called for a criticism based in “an erotics of art” rather than “a hermeneutics.”