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