Sontag Art Quotes & Sayings

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. — Susan Sontag

[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 front behind which other issues, ultimately ethical and political, are being debated. — Susan Sontag

Interpretation, based on the highly dubious theory that a work of art is composed of items of content, violates art. It makes art into an article for use, for arrangement into a mental scheme of categories. — Susan Sontag

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. — Susan Sontag

In contrast to the asexual chasteness of official communist art , Nazi art is both prurient and idealizing. A utopian aesthetics (physical perfection; identity as a biological given) implies an ideal eroticism: sexuality converted into the magnetism of leaders and the joy of followers. The fascist ideal is to transform sexual energy into a "spiritual" force, for the benefit of the community. — Susan Sontag

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. — Susan Sontag

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. — Susan Sontag

This philistinism of interpretation is more rife in literature than in any other art. For decades now, literary critics have understood it to be their task to translate the elements of the poem or play or novel or story into something else. Sometimes a writer will be so uneasy before the naked power of his art that he will install within the work itself - albeit with a little shyness, a touch of the good taste of irony - the clear and explicit interpretation of it. Thomas Mann is an example of such an overcooperative author. In the case of more stubborn authors, the critic is only too happy to perform the job. — Susan Sontag

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

To discuss the idea of silence in art is to discuss the various alternatives within this essentially unalterable situation. 4 — Susan Sontag

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. — Susan Sontag

In the most modern instances, interpretation amounts to the philistine refusal to leave the work of art alone. Real art has the capacity to make us nervous. By reducing the work of art to its content and then interpreting that, one tames the work of art. Interpretation makes art manageable, comfortable. — Susan Sontag

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

Our task is not to find the maximum amount of content in a work of art, mush less to squeeze more content out of the work than is already there. Our task is to cut back on content so we can see the thing at all. 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. — Susan Sontag

Philosophy is an art form - art of thought or thought as art — Susan Sontag

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. — Susan Sontag

As long as art is understood and valued as an "absolute" activity, it will be a separate, elitist one. Elites presuppose masses. So far as the best art defines itself by essentially "priestly" aims, it presupposes and confirms the existence of a relatively passive, never fully initiated, voyeuristic laity which is regularly convoked to watch, listen, read, or hear - and then sent away. — Susan Sontag

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. — Susan Sontag

To us, the difference between the # photographer as an individual eye and the photographer as an objective recorder seems fundamental, the difference often regarded, mistakenly, as separating photography as art from # photography as document. But both are logical extensions of what photography means: note-taking on, potentially, everything in the world, from every possible angle. — Susan Sontag

I wish I had devoted all of my time writing to literature.
Those essays in the 60's, they were insolent, you know, like a young persons work. I wouldn't mind if the essays, at some point, evaporated.
I think fiction .. I think literature .. I think narrative, is what lasts.
I do believe that there is such a thing as truth. But I prefer the mode in which truth appears in art or literature. In literature a truth is something who's opposite is also true. — Susan Sontag

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? — Susan Sontag

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. — Susan Sontag

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

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. — Susan Sontag

Interpretation is the revenge of the intellectual upon art. — Susan Sontag

The "Art Nouveau" appeal of smoking: manufacture your own pneuma, spirit. "I'm alive." "I'm decorative. — Susan Sontag

Most valuable art in our time has been experienced by audiences as a move into silence (or unintelligibility or invisibility or inaudibility); a dismantling of the artist's competence, his responsible sense of vocation - and therefore as an aggression against them. Modern — Susan Sontag

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. — Susan Sontag

Self-exposure is commendable in art only when it is of a quality and complexity that allows other people to learn about themselves from it. — Susan Sontag

There is the satisfaction of being able to look at the image without flinching. There is the pleasure of flinching. — Sontag, Susan

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 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. — Susan Sontag

None of us can ever retrieve that innocence before all theory when art knew no need to justify itself, when one did not ask of a work of art what it said because one knew what it did. From now to the end of consciousness, we are stuck with the task of defending art. — Susan Sontag

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. — Susan Sontag

Art is seduction, not rape. — Susan Sontag

Camp is art that proposes itself seriously, but cannot be taken altogether seriously because it is too much. — Susan Sontag

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

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. — Susan Sontag

One of art photography's most vigorous enterprises
[is] concentrating on victims, on the unfortunate
but without the compassionate purpose that such a project is expected to serve. — Susan Sontag

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

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. — Susan Sontag

Denying that art is mere expression, the later myth rather relates art to the mind's need or capacity for self-estrangement. — Susan Sontag

Photographs shock insofar as they show something novel. — Susan Sontag

Pop art: only possible in an affluent society, where one can be free to enjoy ironic consumption. — Susan Sontag

A great private collection is a material concentrate that continually stimulates, that overexcites. Not only because it can always be added to, but because it is already too much. The collector's need is precisely for excess, for surfeit, for profusion. It's too much - and it's just enough for me. ... A collection is always more than is necessary. — Susan Sontag

Art is not only about something; it is something. A work of art is a thing in the world, not just a text or commentary on the world. — Susan Sontag

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

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

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. — Susan Sontag

Art is a form of consciousness. — Susan Sontag

We live in a time in which tragedy is not an art form but a form of history. — Susan Sontag

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.
Even more. It is the revenge of the intellect upon the world. To interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world - in order to set up a shadow world of 'meanings.' It is to turn the world into this world. ('This world'! As if there were any other.)
The world, our world, is depleted, impoverished enough. Away with all duplicates of it, until we again experience more immediately what we have. — Susan Sontag

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. — Susan Sontag

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. — Susan Sontag

The history of art is a sequence of successful transgressions. — Susan Sontag

Real art has the capacity to make us nervous. — Susan Sontag

The only interesting ideas are heresies — Susan Sontag

The last achievement of the serious admirer is to stop immediately putting to work the energies aroused by, filling up the space opened by, what is admired. Thereby talented admirers give themselves permission to breathe, to breathe more deeply. But for that it is necessary to go beyond avidity; to identify with something beyond achievement, beyond the gathering of power. — Susan Sontag

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. — Susan Sontag

All aesthetic judgment is really cultural evaluation. — Susan Sontag

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. — Susan Sontag

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

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

Perhaps the only people with the right to look at images of suffering of this extreme order are those who could do something to alleviate it - say, the surgeons at the military hospital where the photograph was taken - or those who could learn from it. The rest of us are voyeurs, whether or not we mean to be. — Sontag, Susan

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. — Susan Sontag

In most modern instances, interpretation amounts to the philistine refusal to leave the work of art alone. Real art has the capacity to make us nervous. By reducing the work of art to its content and then interpreting that, one tames the work of art. Interpretation makes art manageable, conformable. — Susan Sontag

Strictly speaking, nothing that's said is true. (Though one can be the truth, one can't ever say it.) — Susan Sontag

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. — Susan Sontag

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

Art today is a new kind of instrument, an instrument for modifying consciousness and organizing new modes of sensibility ... Artists have had to become self-conscious aestheticians: continually challenging their means, their materials and methods. — Susan Sontag

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

It seems that the appetite for pictures showing bodies in pain is as keen, almost, as the desire for ones that show bodies naked. For many centuries, in Christian art, depictions of hell offered both of these elemental satisfactions. — Sontag, Susan

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. — Susan Sontag

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. — Susan Sontag

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 — Susan Sontag

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

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

The idea of content in art is today merely a hindrance, a nuisance, a subtle or not so subtle philistinism. — Susan Sontag

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