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Susan Sontag Quotes about Art - Page 2

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 fret about words, we writers. Words mean. Words point. They are arrows. Arrows stuck in the rough hide of reality. And the more portentous, more general the word, the more they can also resemble rooms or tunnels.

We fret about words, we writers. Words mean. Words point. They are arrows. Arrows stuck in the rough hide of reality. And the more portentous, more general the word, the more they can also resemble rooms or tunnels. They can expand, or cave in. They can come to be filled with a bad smell. They will often remind us of other rooms, where we'd rather dwell or where we think we are already living. They can be spaces we lose the art or the wisdom of inhabiting. And eventually those volumes of mental intention we no longer know how to inhabit will be abandoned, boarded up, closed down.

Art, Writing, Mean

Photography - the supreme form of travel, of tourism - is the principal modern means for enlarging the world. As a branch of art, photography's enterprise of world enlargement tends to specialize in the subjects felt to be challenging, transgressive. A photograph may be telling us: this too exists. And that. And that. (And it is all 'human.') But what are we to do with this knowledge - if indeed it is knowledge, about, say, the self, about abnormality, about ostracized or clandestine worlds?

Photography, Art, Mean

Photographs trade simultaneously on the prestige of art and the magic of the real.

Photography, Art, Real

Susan Sontag (2011). “On Photography”, p.63, Macmillan

As one passion begins to fail it is necessary to form another, for the whole art of going through life tolerably is to keep oneself eager about anything.

Life, Art, Passion

Susan Sontag (1992). “The Volcano Lover”

Camp taste turns its back on the good-bad axis of ordinary aesthetic judgment. Camp doesn't reverse things. It doesn't argue that the good is bad, or the bad is good. What it does is to offer for art, and life, a different - a supplementary - set of standards.

Art, Axes, Ordinary

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

The tradition of portrait painting, to embellish or idealize the subject, remains the aim of everyday and of commercial photography, but it has had a much more limited career in photography considered as art. Generally speaking, the honors have gone to the Cordelias.

Photography, Art, Careers

Susan Sontag (2011). “On Photography”, p.93, Farrar, Straus and Giroux

The basic unit for contemporary art is not the idea, but the analysis of and extension of sensations.

Art, Ideas, Analysis

The moral pleasure in art, as well as the moral service that art performs, consists in the intelligent gratification of consciousness.

Art, Intelligent, Moral

Susan Sontag (2014). “A Susan Sontag Reader”, p.214, Macmillan

The purpose of art is always, ultimately, to give pleasure - though our sensibilities may take time to catch up with the forms of pleasure that art in a given time may offer.

Art, Giving, Purpose

Unfortunately, moral beauty in art - like physical beauty in a person - is extremely perishable.

Art, Moral, Physical Beauty

If within the last century art conceived as an autonomous activity has come to be invested with an unprecedented stature - the nearest thing to a sacramental human activity acknowledged by secular society - it is because one of the tasks art has assumed is making forays into and taking up positions on the frontiers of consciousness (often very dangerous to the artist as a person) and reporting back what's there.

Art, Secular Society, Tasks

"Styles of Radical Will" by Susan Sontag, (p. 45), 1966.

Today is such a time, when the project of interpretation is largely reactionary, stifling. Like the fumes of the automobile and of heavy industry which befoul the urban atmosphere, the effusion of interpretations of art today poisons our sensibilities. In a culture whose already classical dilemma is the hypertrophy of the intellect at the expense of energy and sensual capability, interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art.

Art, Revenge, Sensual

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

Unfortunately, moral beauty in art - like physical beauty in a person - is extremely perishable. It is nowhere so durable as artistic or intellectual beauty. Moral beauty has a tendency to decay very rapidly into sententiousness or untimeliness.

Beauty, Art, Intellectual

Transparence is the highest, most liberating value in art - and in criticism - today. Transparence means experiencing the luminousness of the thing in itself, of things being what they are.

Art, Mean, Criticism

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

Art is seduction, not rape.

Art, Seduction, Art Is

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

One task of literature is to formulate questions and construct counterstatements to the reigning pieties. And even when art is not oppositional, the arts gravitate toward contrariness. Literature is dialogue: responsiveness. Literature might be described as the history of human responsiveness to what is alive and what is moribund as cultures evolve and interact with one another.

Art, Tasks, Culture

Susan Sontag, Börsenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels (2003). “Susan Sontag: Ansprachen aus Anlass der Verleihung”

art is the most general condition of the Past in the present. ... Perhaps no work of art is art. It can only become art, when it is part of the past. In this normative sense, a 'contemporary' work of art would be a contradiction - except so far as we can, in the present, assimilate the present to the past.

Art, Past, Would Be

The notion of art as the dearly purchased outcome of an immense spiritual risk, one whose cost goes up with the entry and participation of each new player in the game.

Spiritual, Art, Player

"Styles of Radical Will" by Susan Sontag, (p. 45), 1966.

In the final analysis, style is art. And art is nothing more or less than various modes of stylized, dehumanized representation.

Art, Style, Finals

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

Is it the obligation of great art to be continually interesting? I think not.

Art, Thinking, Interesting

The "happening" operates by creating an asymmetrical network of surprises, without climax or consummation, this is the alogism of dreams rather than the logic of most art.

Dream, Art, Creating

The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art - and, by analogy, our own experience - more, rather than less, real to us. The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means.

Art, Real, Mean

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

Although photography generates works that can be called art-it requires subjectivity, it can lie, it gives aesthetic pleasure-photography is not, to begin with, an art form at all. Like language, it is a medium in which works of art (among other things) are made.

Photography, Art, Lying

Susan Sontag (2011). “On Photography”, p.130, Macmillan

Making social comment is an artificial place for an artist to start from. If an artist is touched by some social condition, what the artist creates will reflect that, but you can't force it.

Art, Social, Force

Cinema is a kind of pan-art. It can use, incorporate, engulf virtually any other art: the novel, poetry, theater, painting, sculpture, dance, music, architecture. Unlike opera, which is a (virtually) frozen art form, the cinema is and has been a fruitfully conservative medium of ideas and styles of emotions.

Movie, Art, Ideas

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