Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Pain
Painful
Lowering
Art
Changes
Formerly
Used
Bears
Threshold
Much
Terrible
Morals
Hear
Shocking
Modern
Embarrassing
Moral
Devoted
Getting
Bear

More quotes by Susan Sontag

Image
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
Image
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
Image
When you are writing, you are - from society's point of view - only producing the first version which will then be processed and recycled.
Susan Sontag
Image
The culture-heroes of our liberal bourgeois civilisation are ant-liberal and ant-bourgeois . . .
Susan Sontag
Image
Mad people = People who stand alone and burn. I'm attracted to them because they give me permission to do the same.
Susan Sontag
Image
Real art has the capacity to make us nervous.
Susan Sontag
Image
Writing is a mysterious activity.
Susan Sontag
Image
The photographer both loots and preserves, denounces and consecrates.
Susan Sontag
Image
the process of building a self and its works is always too slow. One is always in arrears to oneself.
Susan Sontag
Image
Pornography is a theatre of types, never of individuals.
Susan Sontag
Image
Anything in history or nature that can be described as changing steadily can be seen as heading toward catastrophe.
Susan Sontag
Image
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
Image
One criticizes in others what one recognizes and despises in oneself. For example, an artist who is revolted by another’s ambitiousness.
Susan Sontag
Image
Art is seduction, not rape.
Susan Sontag
Image
It is the action of bodies on bodies, not bodies on minds, which the crowd enjoys.
Susan Sontag
Image
Ultimately ideas come out of a temperament or a sensibility, they are a crystallization or a precipitation of temperament.
Susan Sontag
Image
Life is not significant details, illuminated by a flash, fixed forever. Photographs are.
Susan Sontag
Image
Result of self-consciousness: audience and actor are the same. I live my life as a spectacle for myself, for my own edification. I live my life but I don't live in it. The hoarding instinct in human relations.
Susan Sontag
Image
What pornography is really about, ultimately, isn't sex but death.
Susan Sontag
Image
Norman Mailer in his writings is ultimately more concerned with success than with danger danger is only a means to success.
Susan Sontag