Art Quotes by Susan Sontag

In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art.

— Susan Sontag

Art is a form of consciousness.

— Susan Sontag

Real art has the capacity to make us nervous.

— Susan Sontag

Art is seduction, not rape.

— Susan Sontag

“The “Art Nouveau” appeal of smoking: manufacture your own pneuma, spirit. “I’m alive.” “I’m decorative.”

— Susan Sontag

“All aesthetic judgment is really cultural evaluation.”

— Susan Sontag

Never worry about being obsessive. I like obsessive people. Obsessive people make great art

— Susan Sontag

Art is not consciousness per se, but rather its antidote- evolved from within consciousness itself.

— Susan Sontag

Unfortunately, moral beauty in art - like physical beauty in a person - is extremely perishable.

— Susan Sontag

The history of art is a sequence of successful transgressions.

— Susan Sontag

One doesn't need to know the artist's private intentions. The work tells all.

— Susan Sontag

The basic unit for contemporary art is not the idea, but the analysis of and extension of sensations.

— Susan Sontag

In the final analysis, style is art. And art is nothing more or less than various modes of stylized, dehumanized representation.

— Susan Sontag

... one of art photography's most vigorous enterprises--[is] concentrating on victims, on the unfortunate--but without the compassionate purpose that such a project…

— Susan Sontag

The purpose of art is always, ultimately, to give pleasure - though our sensibilities may take time to catch up with the…

— Susan Sontag

The work of art itself is . . . a vibrant, magical, and exemplary object which returns us to the world in…

— Susan Sontag

The writers or artists I write about are not necessarily those I care most about (Shakespeare is still my favourite writer) but…

— Susan Sontag

The "happening" operates by creating an asymmetrical network of surprises, without climax or consummation, this is the alogism of dreams rather than…

— Susan Sontag

In a culture whose already classical dilemma is the hypertrophy of the intellect at the expense of energy and sensual capability, interpretation…

— Susan Sontag

Photography is an elegiac art, a twilight art. Most subjects photographed are, just by virtue of being photographed, touched with pathos.

— Susan Sontag

The destiny of photography has taken it far beyond the role to which it was originally thought to be limited: to give…

— Susan Sontag

In most modern instances, interpretation amounts to the philistine refusal to leave the work of art alone. Real art has the capacity…

— Susan Sontag

Music is at once the most wonderful, the most alive of all the arts- it is the most abstract, the most perfect,…

— Susan Sontag

One task of literature is to formulate questions and construct counterstatements to the reigning pieties. And even when art is not oppositional,…

— Susan Sontag

If within the last century art conceived as an autonomous activity has come to be invested with an unprecedented stature - the…

— Susan Sontag

Unfortunately, moral beauty in art - like physical beauty in a person - is extremely perishable. It is nowhere so durable as…

— Susan Sontag

art is the most general condition of the Past in the present. ... Perhaps no work of art is art. It can…

— Susan Sontag

Art today is a new kind of instrument, an instrument for modifying consciousness and organizing new modes of sensibility . . .…

— Susan Sontag

It is a nostalgic time right now, and photographs actively promote nostalgia. Photography is an elegiac art, a twilight art. Most subjects…

— Susan Sontag

“But the very question of whether photography is or is not an art is essentially a misleading one. Although photography generates works…

— Susan Sontag

“In one of its aspects, art is a technique for focusing attention, for teaching skills of attention. The history of the arts…

— Susan Sontag

“Today is such a time, when the project of interpretation is largely reactionary, stifling. Like the fumes of the automobile and of…

— Susan Sontag

Today is such a time, when the project of interpretation is largely reactionary, stifling. Like the fumes of the automobile and of…

— Susan Sontag

“We fret about words, we writers. Words mean. Words point. They are arrows. Arrows stuck in the rough hide of reality. And…

— Susan Sontag

“This philistinism of interpretation is more rife in literature than in any other art. For decades now, literary critics have understood it…

— Susan Sontag

“Ordinary language fixes the difference between handmade images like Goya's and photographs by the convention that artists "make" drawings and paintings while…

— Susan Sontag

All great art contains at its center contemplation, a dynamic contemplation.

— Susan Sontag

Photographs trade simultaneously on the prestige of art and the magic of the real.

— Susan Sontag

The most potent elements in a work of art are, often, its silences.

— Susan Sontag

Interpretation is the revenge of the intellectual upon art.

— Susan Sontag