Interpretation translates the sensory particulars of a work into abstract content, treating the actual form as a surface to be decoded into meaning. This impulse, while posing as reverence, is an act of aggression that tames the work and makes art manageable and conformable to prearranged categories.
The overvaluing of content provokes the perpetual demand to interpret, so art is approached as a statement rather than an object or sensory event. Reducing a work to what it says drains attention from how it is made and how it appears.
Instead of extracting meaning, criticism should serve the work by revealing its sensuous surface: describing how it looks, sounds, and feels rather than what it means. The proper response to art is immediate sensory experience, so what is needed is an erotics of art in place of a hermeneutics.
Camp is a mode of perception that sees everything in quotation marks, prizing artifice, exaggeration, and stylization over content, sincerity, and moral seriousness. It converts the serious into the frivolous and loves things for being extravagantly what they are, evaluating by the degree of being rather than by beauty or truth.