Susan Sontag Quotes - Page 15

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• 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

  Art, Real, Criticism

  Evergreen Review Dec. 1964

  55 Copy quote

• [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

  Art, Issues, Political

  4 Copy quote

• Cancer patients are lied to, not just because the disease is (or is thought to be) a death sentence, but because it is felt to be obscene - in the original meaning of that word: ill-omened, abominable, repugnant to the senses.

  Susan Sontag

  Cancer, Disease, Patient

  Susan Sontag (1979). “Illness as metaphor”, Vintage

  52 Copy quote

• The two ideas are antithetical. Insofar as photography is (or should be) about the world, the photographer counts for little, but insofar as it is the instrument of intrepid, questioning subjectivity, the photographer is all.

  Susan Sontag

  Photography, Ideas, Two

  4 Copy quote

• It seems positively unnatural to travel without taking a camera along... The very activity of taking pictures is soothing and assuages general feelings of disorientation that are likely to be exacerbated by travel.

  Susan Sontag

  Photography, Feelings, Cameras

  Susan Sontag (1978). “On photography”, Delta

  66 Copy quote

• To travel is to shop.

  Susan Sontag

  Shopping, Shops

  Susan Sontag (1992). “The Volcano Lover”

  4 Copy quote

• The only story that seems worth writing is a cry, a shot, a scream. A story should break the reader's heart.

  Susan Sontag

  Writing, Heart, Stories

  Susan Sontag (2012). “As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks, 1964-1980”, p.407, Macmillan

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Photography, Art, Mean

  Susan Sontag (2011). “On Photography”, p.152, Macmillan

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Art, Revenge, Order

  10 Copy quote

• The camera can be lenient; it is can also expert at being cruel. But its cruelty only produces another kind of beauty, according to the surrealist preferences which rule photographic taste.

  Susan Sontag

  Taste, Cameras, Experts

  Susan Sontag (2011). “On Photography”, p.93, Macmillan

  4 Copy quote

• Photographs shock insofar as they show something novel.

  Susan Sontag

  Photograph, Shock, Novel

  Susan Sontag (2011). “On Photography”, p.20, Macmillan

  4 Copy quote

• The taste for worst-case scenarios reflects the need to master fear of what is felt to be uncontrollable. It also expresses an imaginative complicity with disaster.

  Susan Sontag

  Worst Case Scenario, Needs, Taste

  26 Copy quote

• The culture-heroes of our liberal bourgeois civilisation are ant-liberal and ant-bourgeois . . .

  Susan Sontag

  Hero, Culture, Ants

  4 Copy quote

• With the modern diseases (once TB, now cancer) the romantic idea that the disease expresses the character is invariably extended to assert that the character causes the disease -- because it has not expressed itself. Passion moves inward, striking and blighting the deepest cellular recesses.

  Susan Sontag

  Cancer, Moving, Passion

  Susan Sontag (1979). “Illness as metaphor”, Vintage

  7 Copy quote

• Al forms of consensus about ''great'' books and ''perennial'' problems, once stabilized, tend to deteriorate eventually into something philistine. The real life of the mind is always at the frontiers of ''what is already known.'' Those great books don't only need custodians and transmitters. To stay alive, they also need adversaries. The most interesting ideas are heresies.

  Susan Sontag

  Real, Book, Ideas

  Susan Sontag (1983). “A Susan Sontag reader”, Vintage

  8 Copy quote

• Though collecting quotations could be considered as merely an ironic mimetism -- victimless collecting, as it were... in a world that is well on its way to becoming one vast quarry, the collector becomes someone engaged in a pious work of salvage. The course of modern history having already sapped the traditions and shattered the living wholes in which precious objects once found their place, the collector may now in good conscience go about excavating the choicer, more emblematic fragments.

  Susan Sontag

  Becoming One, Ironic, World

  On Photography "Melancholy Objects" (1977)

  16 Copy quote

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

  Susan Sontag

  Art, Thinking, Interesting

  8 Copy quote

• Everyone who lives in an industrialized society is obliged gradually to give up the past, but in certain countries, such as the United States and Japan, the break with the past has been particularly traumatic.

  Susan Sontag

  Country, Giving Up, Past

  Susan Sontag (2011). “On Photography”, p.11, Macmillan

  5 Copy quote

• When comedy fails, seriousness begins to leak back in.

  Susan Sontag

  Comedy, Failing, Leaks

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• 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

  Art, Revenge, Sensual

  Susan Sontag (2014). “A Susan Sontag Reader”, p.149, Macmillan

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Cutting, Ideas, Creative

  4 Copy quote

• Persons who merely have-a-life customarily move in a dense fluid. That's how they're able to conduct their lives at all. Their living depends on not seeing.

  Susan Sontag

  Life, Moving, Able

  4 Copy quote

• Literature usually begets literature.

  Susan Sontag

  Literature, Begets

  Susan Sontag (2013). “Against Interpretation and Other Essays”, p.72, Penguin UK

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Spiritual, Insanity, Feelings

  Susan Sontag (1979). “Illness as metaphor”, Vintage

  4 Copy quote

• Nobody ever discovered ugliness through photographs. But many, through photographs, have discovered beauty.

  Susan Sontag

  Photography, Photograph, Ugliness

  Susan Sontag (2011). “On Photography”, p.76, Macmillan

  4 Copy quote

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