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
[T]he visibility of styles is itself a product of historical consciousness. ... The very notion of "style" needs to be approached historically.… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
Photographs trade simultaneously on the prestige of art and the magic of the real. — 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
Although photography generates works that can be called art-it requires subjectivity, it can lie, it gives aesthetic pleasure-photography is not, to begin… — 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
“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
“Pop art: only possible in an affluent society, where one can be free to enjoy ironic consumption.” — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art - and, by analogy, our own experience… — 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
Interpretation, based on the highly dubious theory that a work of art is composed of items of content, violates art. It makes… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
“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 Copy Share Image
When something is just bad, it's often because it is too mediocre in its ambition. The artist hasn't attempted to do anything… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
“As long as art is understood and valued as an “absolute” activity, it will be a separate, elitist one. Elites presuppose masses.… — 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
To be an artist or a writer is to be this weird thing - a hand worker in an era of mass… — 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
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
To me, literature is a calling, even a kind of salvation. It connects me with an enterprise that is over 2,000 years… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
Cinema is a kind of pan-art. It can use, incorporate, engulf virtually any other art: the novel, poetry, theater, painting, sculpture, dance,… — 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
Art is not consciousness per se, but rather its antidote- evolved from within consciousness itself. — 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
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
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