Susan Sontag - Art Quotes

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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'.

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

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

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. A better state of one's feelings or simply the idea of a silence in one's self that allows one to think or to feel. Which to me is the same.

Susan Sontag
What the overemphasis on the idea of content entails is the perennial, never consummated project of interpretation. And, conversely, it is the habit of approaching works of art in order to interpret them that sustains the fancy that there really is such a thing as the content of a work of 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
Science fiction films are not about science. They are about disaster, which is one of the oldest subjects of art.

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
Art today is a new kind of instrument, an instrument for modifying consciousness and organizing new modes of sensibility. And the means for practicing art have been radically extended.... Painters no longer feel themselves confined to canvas and paint, but employ hair, photographs, wax, sand, bicycle tires, their own toothbrushes and socks. Musicians have reached beyond the sounds of the traditional instruments to use tampered instruments and (usually on tape) synthetic sounds and industrial noises.

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

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

Susan Sontag
The strongest, most successful move against beauty was in the arts: beauty — and the caring about beauty — was restrictive; as the current idiom has it, elitist. Our appreciations, it was felt, could be so much more inclusive if we said that something, instead of being beautiful, was "interesting".

Susan Sontag
Unfortunately, moral beauty in art — like physical beauty in a person — is extremely perishable.

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
The subtraction of beauty as a standard for art hardly signals a decline of the authority of beauty. Rather, it testifies to a decline in the belief that there is something called art.

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

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
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
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.

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

Susan Sontag