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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

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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
Whose
Expense
Already
Capability
Upon
Classical
Energy
Expenses
Culture
Interpretation
Art
Revenge
Intellect
Dilemma
Criticism
Sensual

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Fewer and fewer Americans possess objects that have a patina, old furniture, grandparents pots and pans - the used things, warm with generations of human touch, essential to a human landscape. Instead, we have our paper phantoms, transistorized landscapes. A featherweight portable museum.
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Shouting has never made me understand anything.
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Cameras began duplicating the world at that moment when the human landscape started to undergo a vertiginous rate of change: while an untold number of forms of biological and social life are being destroyed in a brief span of time, a device is available to record what is disappearing.
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... 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.
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The highest vocation of photography is to explain man to man.
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The past itself, as historical change continues to accelerate, has become the most surreal of subjects - making it possible... to see a new beauty in what is vanishing.
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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.
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If tragedy is an experience of hyperinvolvement, comedy is an experience of underinvolvement, of detachment.
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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.
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I don't write easily or rapidly. My first draft usually has only a few elements worth keeping. I have to find what those are and build from them and throw out what doesn't work, or what simply is not alive.
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That's what a community is: taking for granted certain assumptions, not having to start from zero every time. This is no longer true.
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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
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Ours is an age which consciously pursues health, and yet only believes in the reality of sickness.
Susan Sontag
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The only ideals allowed are healthy ones - those everyone may aspire to, or comfortably imagine oneself possessing.
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Writing is finally a series of permissions you give yourself to be expressive in certain ways. To leap. To fly. To fail.
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What we need is to use what we have.
Susan Sontag
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Loeb has been doing wonderfully patient work, exploring the American conscience from the inside. I regard him as something of a national treasure.
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Creativity needs to be taken care of. It's like a big baby that needs to be nourished.
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To make your life being a writer, it's an auto-slavery ... you are both the slave and the task-master.
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Intelligence is not necessarily a good thing, something to value or cultivate. It's more like a fifth wheel - necessary or desirable when things break down. When things go well, it's better to be stupid ... Stupidity is as much a value as intelligence.
Susan Sontag