“The “Art Nouveau” appeal of smoking: manufacture your own pneuma, spirit. “I’m alive.” “I’m decorative.” — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
Never worry about being obsessive. I like obsessive people. Obsessive people make great art — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
Art is not consciousness per se, but rather its antidote- evolved from within consciousness itself. — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
Unfortunately, moral beauty in art - like physical beauty in a person - is extremely perishable. — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
One doesn't need to know the artist's private intentions. The work tells all. — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
The basic unit for contemporary art is not the idea, but the analysis of and extension of sensations. — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
In the final analysis, style is art. And art is nothing more or less than various modes of stylized, dehumanized representation. — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
... 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 Copy Share Image
The work of art itself is . . . a vibrant, magical, and exemplary object which returns us to the world in… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
The purpose of art is always, ultimately, to give pleasure - though our sensibilities may take time to catch up with the… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
The writers or artists I write about are not necessarily those I care most about (Shakespeare is still my favourite writer) but… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
The "happening" operates by creating an asymmetrical network of surprises, without climax or consummation, this is the alogism of dreams rather than… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
Photography is an elegiac art, a twilight art. Most subjects photographed are, just by virtue of being photographed, touched with pathos. — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
In a culture whose already classical dilemma is the hypertrophy of the intellect at the expense of energy and sensual capability, interpretation… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
The destiny of photography has taken it far beyond the role to which it was originally thought to be limited: to give… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
In most modern instances, interpretation amounts to the philistine refusal to leave the work of art alone. Real art has the capacity… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
Music is at once the most wonderful, the most alive of all the arts- it is the most abstract, the most perfect,… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
One task of literature is to formulate questions and construct counterstatements to the reigning pieties. And even when art is not oppositional,… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
If within the last century art conceived as an autonomous activity has come to be invested with an unprecedented stature - the… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
Unfortunately, moral beauty in art - like physical beauty in a person - is extremely perishable. It is nowhere so durable as… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
art is the most general condition of the Past in the present. ... Perhaps no work of art is art. It can… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
Art today is a new kind of instrument, an instrument for modifying consciousness and organizing new modes of sensibility . . .… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
“But the very question of whether photography is or is not an art is essentially a misleading one. Although photography generates works… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
It is a nostalgic time right now, and photographs actively promote nostalgia. Photography is an elegiac art, a twilight art. Most subjects… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
“In one of its aspects, art is a technique for focusing attention, for teaching skills of attention. The history of the arts… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
“Today is such a time, when the project of interpretation is largely reactionary, stifling. Like the fumes of the automobile and of… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
Today is such a time, when the project of interpretation is largely reactionary, stifling. Like the fumes of the automobile and of… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
“We fret about words, we writers. Words mean. Words point. They are arrows. Arrows stuck in the rough hide of reality. And… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
“This philistinism of interpretation is more rife in literature than in any other art. For decades now, literary critics have understood it… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
Knowing a great deal about what is in the world art, catastrophe, the beauties of nature through photographic images, people are frequently… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
Photographs trade simultaneously on the prestige of art and the magic of the real. — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
All great art contains at its center contemplation, a dynamic contemplation. — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
the appetite for thinking must be regulated, as all sensible people know, for it may stifle one's life. — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
Unfortunately, moral beauty in art - like physical beauty in a person - is extremely perishable. It is nowhere so durable as artistic or… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
Like the collector, the photographer is animated by a passion that, even when it appears to be for the present, is linked to a… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
Anthropology has always struggled with an intense, fascinated repulsion towards its subject… [The anthropologist] submits himself to the exotic to confirm his own inner… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
“Why not eliminate schooling between age 12-16? It’s biologically + psychologically too turbulent a time to be cooped up inside, made to sit all… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
To photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them that they can never… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
One set of messages of the society we live in is: Consume. Grow. Do what you want. Amuse yourselves. The very working of this… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
Currently intellectuals in Western Europe and North America are extremely demoralized and shaken by the rise of a virulent conservative tendency (which some have… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
With the modern diseases (once TB, now cancer) the romantic idea that the disease expresses the character is invariably extended to assert that the… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
As objects of contemplation, images of the atrocious can answer to several different needs. To steel oneself against weakness. To make oneself more numb.… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
The creative phase of an idea coincides with the period during which it insists, cantankerously, on its boundaries, on what makes it different; but… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
![“... one of art photography's most vigorous enterprises--[is] concentrating on victims, on the unfortunate--but without the compassionate purpose that such a project is expected to serve.” quote by Susan Sontag](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/img-quotes/a8a/susan-sontag-332_art_one-of-art-photography-s-most-vigorous-e_1454734.jpg)
![“Anthropology has always struggled with an intense, fascinated repulsion towards its subject… [The anthropologist] submits himself to the exotic to confirm his own inner alienation as an urban intellectual.” quote by Susan Sontag](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/img-quotes/fe1/susan-sontag-332_alienation_anthropology-has-always-struggled-with-a_15322.jpg)
