Susan Sontag Quotes About Art

Quotes about: Art

• Real art has the capacity to make us nervous.

  Susan Sontag

  Art, Real, Design

  Evergreen Review Dec. 1964

• Never worry about being obsessive. I like obsessive people. Obsessive people make great art

  Susan Sontag

  Art, People, Worry

• 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

  Art, Passion, Perfect

  Susan Sontag (2009). “Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947-1963”, p.10, Macmillan

• 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

  Art, Past, Years

  "Susan Sontag Finds Romance". Interview with Leslie Garis, www.nytimes.com. August 2, 1992.

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

  Susan Sontag

  Art, Needs, Hermeneutics

  Susan Sontag (2014). “A Susan Sontag Reader”, p.157, Macmillan

• Art is a form of consciousness.

  Susan Sontag

  Art, Consciousness, Form

  Susan Sontag (2012). “As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks, 1964-1980”, p.42, Farrar, Straus and Giroux

• Interpretation is the revenge of the intellectual upon art.

  Susan Sontag

  Art, Revenge, Women

• All great art contains at its center contemplation, a dynamic contemplation.

  Susan Sontag

  Art, Contemplation, Great Art

  Susan Sontag (2012). “As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks, 1964-1980”, p.50, Macmillan

• Science fiction films are not about science. They are about disaster, which is one of the oldest subjects of art.

  Susan Sontag

  Art, Science, Fiction

  "Against Interpretation and Other Essays" by Susan Sontag, (p. 212), 1966.

• 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

  Art, Writing, Feelings

• 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

  Art, Writing, Destiny

• Time eventually positions most photographs, even the most amateurish, at the level of art.

  Susan Sontag

  Art, Levels, Photograph

  Susan Sontag (2011). “On Photography”, p.22, Macmillan

• It is a nostalgic time right now, and photographs actively promote nostalgia. Photography is an elegiac art, a twilight art. Most subjects photographed are, just by virtue of being photographed, touched with pathos. ... All photographs are memento mori. To take photograph is to participate in another person's mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time's relentless melt

  Susan Sontag

  Photography, Art, Twilight

• 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

• 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

  Beauty, Art, Intellectual

• 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

  Art, Pain, Bears

  On Photography "America, Seen Through Photographs, Darkly" (1977)

• We fret about words, we writers. Words mean. Words point. They are arrows. Arrows stuck in the rough hide of reality. And the more portentous, more general the word, the more they can also resemble rooms or tunnels. They can expand, or cave in. They can come to be filled with a bad smell. They will often remind us of other rooms, where we'd rather dwell or where we think we are already living. They can be spaces we lose the art or the wisdom of inhabiting. And eventually those volumes of mental intention we no longer know how to inhabit will be abandoned, boarded up, closed down.

  Susan Sontag

  Art, Writing, Mean

• [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

• Knowing a great deal about what is in the world art, catastrophe, the beauties of nature through photographic images, people are frequently disappointed, surprised, unmoved when the see the real thing. For photographic images tend to subtract feeling from something we experience at first hand and the feelings they do arouse are, largely, not those we have in real life. Often something disturbs us more in photographed form than it does when we actually experience it.

  Susan Sontag

  Art, Real, Knowing

  Susan Sontag (2011). “On Photography”, p.146, Farrar, Straus and Giroux

• 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

  Photography, Art, Self

  Susan Sontag (2011). “On Photography”, p.9, Macmillan

• 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

  Photography, Art, Lying

  Susan Sontag (2011). “On Photography”, p.130, Macmillan

• Photographs trade simultaneously on the prestige of art and the magic of the real.

  Susan Sontag

  Photography, Art, Real

  Susan Sontag (2011). “On Photography”, p.63, Macmillan

• 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

  Life, Art, Passion

  Susan Sontag (1992). “The Volcano Lover”

• Art is seduction, not rape.

  Susan Sontag

  Art, Seduction, Art Is

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

• Making social comment is an artificial place for an artist to start from. If an artist is touched by some social condition, what the artist creates will reflect that, but you can't force it.

  Susan Sontag

  Art, Social, Force

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