“Strictly speaking, nothing that’s said is true. (Though one can be the truth, one can’t ever say it.)” — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
The idea of content in art is today merely a hindrance, a nuisance, a subtle or not so subtle philistinism. — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
Time eventually positions most photographs, even the most amateurish, at the level of art. — 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
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
Is it the obligation of great art to be continually interesting? I think not. — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
Transparence is the highest, most liberating value in art - and in criticism - today. Transparence means experiencing the luminousness of the… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
Self-exposure is commendable in art only when it is of a quality and complexity that allows other people to learn about themselves… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
Art is not only about something; it is something. A work of art is a thing in the world, not just a… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
The notion of art as the dearly purchased outcome of an immense spiritual risk, one whose cost goes up with the entry… — 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
A work of art, so far as it is a work of art, cannot - whatever the artist's personal intention - advocate… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
The moral pleasure in art, as well as the moral service that art performs, consists in the intelligent gratification of consciousness. — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
Making social comment is an artificial place for an artist to start from. If an artist is touched by some social condition,… — 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
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
“BEAUTY. The visionary authority of Childs’s work resides, in part, in its lack of rhetoric. Her strict avoidance of cliché, and of… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
In the greatest art, one is always aware of things that cannot be said. . .of the contradiction between expression and the… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
In contrast to the asexual chasteness of official communist art , Nazi art is both prurient and idealizing. A utopian aesthetics (physical… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
We live under continual threat of two equally fearful, but seemingly opposed destinies: unremitting banality and inconceivable terror. It is fantasy, served… — 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
Our task is not to find the maximum amount of content in a work of art, mush less to squeeze more content… — 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
“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
As one passion begins to fail it is necessary to form another, for the whole art of going through life tolerably is… — 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.” — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
Camp is art that proposes itself seriously, but cannot be taken altogether seriously because it is 'too much. — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
Science fiction films are not about science. They are about disaster, which is one of the oldest subjects of art. — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
What seems distinctively modern as a unit of thought, of art, of discourse is the fragment; and the quotation is one kind… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
As industrialization provided social uses for the operations of the photographer, so the reaction against these uses reinforced the self-consciousness of photography-as-art. — 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
Much of modern art is devoted to lowering the threshold of what is terrible. By getting us used to what, formerly, we… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
To us, the difference between the # photographer as an individual eye and the photographer as an objective recorder seems fundamental, the… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
The best emotions to write out of are anger and fear or dread. The least energizing emotion to write out of is… — 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
The tradition of portrait painting, to embellish or idealize the subject, remains the aim of everyday and of commercial photography, but it… — 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
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
“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
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
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
![“[T]he visibility of styles is itself a product of historical consciousness. ... The very notion of "style" needs to be approached historically. Awareness of style as a problematic and isolable element in a work of art has emerged in the audience for art only at certain historical moments - as a…” quote by Susan Sontag](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/img-quotes/514/susan-sontag-332_art_t-he-visibility-of-styles-is-itself-a-pr_157682.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)
