Quote

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

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Susan Sontag
Age: 71 †
Born: 1933
Born: January 16
Died: 2004
Died: December 28
Author
Essayist
Feminist
Film Critic
Film Director
Historian
Human Rights Activist
Journalist
Literary Critic
Novelist
Opinion Journalist
New York City
New York
Susan Rosenblatt
Threat
Fearful
Inconceivable
Large
Opposed
Destinies
Destiny
Equally
Twin
Art
Allows
Continual
Two
Arts
Cope
Specters
Live
Popular
Seemingly
Unremitting
Writing
Terror
Twins
Rations
People
Fantasy
Served
Banality

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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.
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When Cartier-Bresson goes to China, he shows that there are people in China, and that they are Chinese.
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All my life I've been looking for someone intelligent to talk to.
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I don't write because there's an audience. I write because there is literature.
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Taste has no system and no proofs.
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One cannot use the life to interpret the work. But One can use the work to interpret the life.
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That sort of reception - where everything is assimilated to the world of celebrity - makes me dream of becoming a more recalcitrant, harder to assimilate writer.
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One could plausibly argue that it is for quite sound reasons that the whole capacity for sexual ecstasy is inaccessible to most people - given that sexuality is something, like nuclear energy, which may prove amenable to domestication through scruple, but then again may not.
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There are more and more taboos about calling something, anything, ugly.
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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.
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Few ever see what is not already inside their heads.
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Each of us carries a room within ourselves, waiting to be furnished and peopled, and if you listen closely, you may need to silence everything in your own room, you can hear the sounds of that other room inside your head.
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The photographer both loots and preserves, denounces and consecrates.
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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.
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Silence remains, inescapably, a form of speech.
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Surrealism in painting amounted to little more than the contents of a meagerly stocked dream world: a few witty fantasies, mostly wet dreams and agoraphobic nightmares.
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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.
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The white race is the cancer of human history.
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Along with people who pretty themselves for the camera, the unattractive and the disaffected have been assigned their beauty.
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By furnishing this already crowded world with a duplicate one of images, photography makes us feel that the world is more available than it really is.
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