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TB [tuberculosis] was a disease in the service of a romantic view of the world. Cancer is now in the service of a simplistic view of the world that can turn paranoid.
Susan Sontag
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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
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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
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Fatal illness has always been viewed as a test of moral character, but in the nineteenth century there is a great reluctance to let anybody flunk the test.
Susan Sontag
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A writer, I think, is someone who pays attention to the world. That means trying to understand, take in, connect with, what wickedness human beings are capable of; and not be corrupted — made cynical, superficial — by this understanding.
Susan Sontag
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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
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The old style of interpretation was insistent, but respectful; it erected another meaning on top of the literal one. The modern style of interpretation excavates, and as it excavates, destroys; it digs 'behind' the text, to find a sub-text which is the true one.
Susan Sontag
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The photographic image eclipses other forms of understanding—and remembering..... To remember is, more and more, not to recall a story but to be able to call up a picture.
Susan Sontag
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Between two fantasy alternatives, that Holbein the Younger had lived long enough to have painted Shakespeare or that a prototype of the camera had been invented early enough to have photographed him, most Bardolators would choose the photograph. This is not just because it would presumably show what Shakespeare really looked like, for even if the photograph were faded, barely legible, a brownish shadow, we would probably still prefer it to another glorious Holbein. Having a photograph of Shakespeare would be like having a nail from the True Cross.
Susan Sontag
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There is an aggression implicit in every use of the camera.
Susan Sontag
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To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed. It means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge-and therefore, like power.
Susan Sontag
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Despite the illusion of giving understanding, what seeing through photographs really invites is an acquisitive relation to the world that nourishes aesthetic awareness and promotes emotional detachment.
Susan Sontag
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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
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One can be serious about the frivolous, frivolous about the serious.
Susan Sontag
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One doesn't need to know the artist's private intentions. The work tells all.
Susan Sontag
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Someone who is perennially surprised that depravity exists, who continues to feel disillusioned (even incredulous) when confronted with evidence of what humans are capable of inflicting in the way of gruesome, hands-on cruelties upon other humans, has not reached moral or psychological adulthood.
Susan Sontag
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Bleak factory buildings and billboard-cluttered avenues look as beautiful, through the camera's eye, as churches and pastoral landscapes.
Susan Sontag
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It's not 'natural' to speak well, eloquently, in an interesting, articulate way. People living in groups, families, communes say little - have few verbal means. Eloquence - thinking in words - is a byproduct of solitude, deracination, a heightened painful individuality. In groups, it's more natural to sing, to dance, to pray: given, rather than invented (individual) speech.
Susan Sontag
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Surrealism can only deliver a reactionary judgment; can make out of history only an accumulation of oddities, a joke, a death trip.
Susan Sontag
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The creative phase of an idea coincides with the period during which it insists, cantankerously, on its boundaries, on what makes it different; but an idea becomes false and impotent when it seeks reconciliation, at cut-rate prices, with other ideas.
Susan Sontag
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In the twentieth century, the repellent, harrowing disease that is made the index of a superior sensitivity, the vehicle of "spiritual" feelings and "critical" discontent, is insanity.
Susan Sontag
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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
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Where once it was the physician who waged bellum contra morbum, the war against disease, now it's the whole society.
Susan Sontag
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Along with people who pretty themselves for the camera, the unattractive and the disaffected have been assigned their beauty.
Susan Sontag
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Nobody ever discovered ugliness through photographs. But many, through photographs, have discovered beauty.
Susan Sontag
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Quote of the day
Eroticism is assenting to life even in death.
Georges Bataille
Susan Sontag
Creative Commons
Born:
January 16, 1933
Died:
December 28, 2004
(aged 71)
Bio:
Susan Sontag was an American writer and filmmaker, teacher and political activist. She published her first major work, the essay "Notes on 'Camp'", in 1964.
Known for:
On Photography (1977)
Against Interpretation (1966)
Regarding the Pain of Others (2003)
Illness as Metaphor (1978)
The Volcano Lover (1992)
Most used words:
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people
taste
photographs
life
beauty
literature
culture
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reality
human
feel
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