Sontag is strongly averse to what she considers to be contemporary interpretation, that is, an overabundance of importance placed upon the content or meaning of an artwork rather than being keenly alert to the sensuous aspects of a given work and developing a descriptive vocabulary for how it appears and how it does whatever it does.

[2]: 7 Sontag asserts that the modern style is quite harmful to art and to audiences alike; enforcing hermeneutics – fallacious, complicated "readings" that seem to engulf an artwork, to the extent that analysis of content begins to degrade, to destroy.

[2]: 13 Sontag also refers to the contemporary world as one of "overproduction... material plentitude" where one's physical senses have been dulled and annihilated by mass production and complex interpretation to the extent that appreciation of the form of art has been lost.

[2]: 11  To Sontag, modernity means a loss of sensory experience and she believes (in corroboration with her theory of the damaging nature of criticism) that the pleasure of art is diminished by such overload of the senses.

In a contemporary review of the book, Benjamin DeMott of The New York Times praised Against Interpretation as "a vivid bit of living history here and now, and at the end of the sixties it may well rank among the invaluable cultural chronicles of these years."