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Susan Sontag Quotes about Art

All Susan Sontag Quotes Age Aids Anxiety Art quotes Awareness Beauty Cancer Change Character Comedy Communism Community Consciousness Country Criticism Culture Death Desire Destiny Detachment Dying Energy Evidence Exercise Failing Feelings Funny Giving Health Heart History Identity Illness Imagination Inspiration Inspirational Journey Joy Judgment Language Life Literature Love Lust Lying Memories Metaphor Morality Nature Pain Painting Passion Past Perfection Photography Pleasure Pollution Purpose Quality Reading Reality Revenge Risk Sexuality Silence Style Suffering Surrealism Today Tradition Tragedy Transformation Travel Understanding Values Violence Waiting War Writing

We live under continual threat of two equally fearful, but seemingly opposed destinies: unremitting banality and inconceivable terror. It is fantasy, served out in large rations by the popular arts, which allows most

We live under continual threat of two equally fearful, but seemingly opposed destinies: unremitting banality and inconceivable terror. It is fantasy, served out in large rations by the popular arts, which allows most people to cope with these twin specters.

Art, Writing, Destiny

The quote is always fascinating because it changes out of context, becomes different and sometimes more mysterious. It has a directness and assertiveness it may not have had in the original. I think the quality of inaccessibility, the mystery, is important - that whatever matters can't be taken in on just one reading or one seeing. This is certainly a quality of the little of art that lasts.

Art, Taken, Reading

Source: ctheory.net

Art is a form of consciousness.

Art, Consciousness, Form

Susan Sontag (2012). “As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks, 1964-1980”, p.42, Farrar, Straus and Giroux

To me, literature is a calling, even a kind of salvation. It connects me with an enterprise that is over 2,000 years old. What do we have from the past? Art and thought. That’s what lasts. That’s what continues to feed people and give them an idea of something better.

Art, Past, Years

"Susan Sontag Finds Romance". Interview with Leslie Garis, www.nytimes.com. August 2, 1992.

Time eventually positions most photographs, even the most amateurish, at the level of art.

Art, Levels, Photograph

Susan Sontag (2011). “On Photography”, p.22, Macmillan

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

Art, People, Worry

In the greatest art, one is always aware of things that cannot be said. . .of the contradiction between expression and the presence of the inexpressible. Stylistic devices are also techniques of avoidance. The most potent elements of a work of art are, often, its silences.

Art, Expression, Silence

Susan Sontag (1983). “A Susan Sontag reader”, Vintage

Real art has the capacity to make us nervous.

Art, Real, Design

Evergreen Review Dec. 1964

A work of art, so far as it is a work of art, cannot - whatever the artist's personal intention - advocate anything at all.

Art, Propaganda, Intention

The history of art is a sequence of successful transgressions.

Art, Successful, Transgression

Susan Sontag (1983). “A Susan Sontag reader”, Vintage

The destiny of photography has taken it far beyond the role to which it was originally thought to be limited: to give more accurate reports on reality (including works of art). Photography is the reality; the real object is often experienced as a letdown.

Photography, Art, Real

Susan Sontag (2011). “On Photography”, p.129, Macmillan

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

Photography, Art, Twilight

Susan Sontag (2011). “On Photography”, p.16, Macmillan

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

Art, Needs, Hermeneutics

Susan Sontag (2014). “A Susan Sontag Reader”, p.157, Macmillan

Knowing a great deal about what is in the world art, catastrophe, the beauties of nature through photographic images, people are frequently disappointed, surprised, unmoved when the see the real thing. For photographic images tend to subtract feeling from something we experience at first hand and the feelings they do arouse are, largely, not those we have in real life. Often something disturbs us more in photographed form than it does when we actually experience it.

Art, Real, Knowing

Susan Sontag (2011). “On Photography”, p.146, Farrar, Straus and Giroux

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

Art, Silence, Elements

Susan Sontag (2014). “A Susan Sontag Reader”, p.230, Macmillan

Science fiction films are not about science. They are about disaster, which is one of the oldest subjects of art.

Art, Science, Fiction

"Against Interpretation and Other Essays" by Susan Sontag, (p. 212), 1966.

Music is at once the most wonderful, the most alive of all the arts- it is the most abstract, the most perfect, the most pure- and the most sensual. I listen with my body and it is my body that aches in response to the passion and pathos embodied in this music.

Art, Passion, Perfect

Susan Sontag (2009). “Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947-1963”, p.10, Macmillan

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

Art, Consciousness, Art Is

Susan Sontag (2014). “A Susan Sontag Reader”, p.262, Macmillan

The work of art itself is . . . a vibrant, magical, and exemplary object which returns us to the world in some way more open and enriched.

Art, World, Way

Susan Sontag (1983). “A Susan Sontag reader”, Vintage

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

Art, Contemplation, Great Art

Susan Sontag (2012). “As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks, 1964-1980”, p.50, Macmillan

The best emotions to write out of are anger and fear or dread. The least energizing emotion to write out of is admiration. It is very difficult to write out of because the basic feeling that goes with admiration is a passive contemplative mood.

Art, Writing, Feelings

Interpretation is the revenge of the intellectual upon art.

Art, Revenge, Women

It is a nostalgic time right now, and photographs actively promote nostalgia. Photography is an elegiac art, a twilight art. Most subjects photographed are, just by virtue of being photographed, touched with pathos. ... All photographs are memento mori. To take photograph is to participate in another person's mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time's relentless melt

Photography, Art, Twilight

What seems distinctively modern as a unit of thought, of art, of discourse is the fragment; and the quotation is one kind of fragment.

Art, Kind, Modern

Source: ctheory.net

Much of modern art is devoted to lowering the threshold of what is terrible. By getting us used to what, formerly, we could not bear to see or hear, because it was too shocking, painful, or embarrassing, art changes morals.

Art, Pain, Bears

On Photography "America, Seen Through Photographs, Darkly" (1977)

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