Top 59 Sontag Art Quotes
#1. The basic unit for contemporary art is not the idea, but the analysis of and extension of sensations.
Susan Sontag
#2. 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
#3. The history of art is a sequence of successful transgressions.
Susan Sontag
#4. 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
#5. 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
#6. To discuss the idea of silence in art is to discuss the various alternatives within this essentially unalterable situation. 4
Susan Sontag
#7. 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
#8. 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
#9. Pop art: only possible in an affluent society, where one can be free to enjoy ironic consumption.
Susan Sontag
#10. 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
#11. 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
#12. Camp is art that proposes itself seriously, but cannot be taken altogether seriously because it is too much.
Susan Sontag
#13. Denying that art is mere expression, the later myth rather relates art to the mind's need or capacity for self-estrangement.
Susan Sontag
#14. 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
#15. Art is not consciousness per se, but rather its antidote- evolved from within consciousness itself.
Susan Sontag
#16. There is the satisfaction of being able to look at the image without flinching. There is the pleasure of flinching.
Sontag, Susan
#17. Never worry about being obsessive. I like obsessive people. Obsessive people make great art
Susan Sontag
#18. 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
#19. 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
#20. 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
#21. 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
#22. 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
#23. 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
#24. 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
#25. 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
#26. Interpretation is the revenge of the intellectual upon art.
Susan Sontag
#27. 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
#28. All great art contains at its center contemplation, a dynamic contemplation.
Susan Sontag
#29. Science fiction films are not about science. They are about disaster, which is one of the oldest subjects of art.
Susan Sontag
#30. 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
#31. Philosophy is an art form - art of thought or thought as art
Susan Sontag
#32. 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
#33. Photographs shock insofar as they show something novel.
Susan Sontag
#34. 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
#35. We live in a time in which tragedy is not an art form but a form of history.
Susan Sontag
#36. 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
#37. 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
#38. 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
#39. 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
#40. Photographs trade simultaneously on the prestige of art and the magic of the real.
Susan Sontag
#41. The "Art Nouveau" appeal of smoking: manufacture your own pneuma, spirit. "I'm alive." "I'm decorative.
Susan Sontag
#42. Strictly speaking, nothing that's said is true. (Though one can be the truth, one can't ever say it.)
Susan Sontag
#43. Is it the obligation of great art to be continually interesting? I think not.
Susan Sontag
#45. The most potent elements in a work of art are, often, its silences.
Susan Sontag
#46. 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
#47. Time eventually positions most photographs, even the most amateurish, at the level of art.
Susan Sontag
#48. 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
#49. Photography is an elegiac art, a twilight art. Most subjects photographed are, just by virtue of being photographed, touched with pathos.
Susan Sontag
#50. All aesthetic judgment is really cultural evaluation.
Susan Sontag
#51. 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
#53. 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
#54. In the final analysis, style is art. And art is nothing more or less than various modes of stylized, dehumanized representation.
Susan Sontag
#56. Real art has the capacity to make us nervous.
Susan Sontag
#57. The idea of content in art is today merely a hindrance, a nuisance, a subtle or not so subtle philistinism.
Susan Sontag
#58. The moral pleasure in art, as well as the moral service that art performs, consists in the intelligent gratification of consciousness.
Susan Sontag
#59. 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
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