Susan Sontag - Work Quotes

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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
In 'life,' I don't want to be reduced to my work. In 'work,' I don't want to be reduced to my life.

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
One doesn't need to know the artist's private intentions. The work tells all.

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
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
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
Using a camera appeases the anxiety which the work-driven feel about not working when they are on vacation and supposed to be having fun. They have something to do that is like a friendly imitation of work: they can take pictures.

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
The process of building a self and its works is always too slow. One is always in arrears to oneself.

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
I don't want to express alienation. It isn't what I feel. I'm interested in various kinds of passionate engagement. All my work says be serious, be passionate, wake up.

Susan Sontag
There is a great deal that either has to be given up or be taken away from you if you are going to succeed in writing a body of work.

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

Susan Sontag
One cannot use the life to interpret the work. But one can use the work to interpret the life.

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