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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.

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
Makes
Interpretation
Scheme
Art
Highly
Article
Work
Content
Composed
Mental
Items
Criticism
Schemes
Based
Arrangements
Violates
Theory
Articles
Dubious
Use
Categories
Arrangement

More quotes by Susan Sontag

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Art is not consciousness per se, but rather its antidote- evolved from within consciousness itself.
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As photographs give people an imaginary possession of a past that is unreal, they also help people to take possession of space in which they are insecure.
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I'm more cautious about what I write.
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How boring just to be a body.
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Never worry about being obsessive. I like obsessive people. Obsessive people make great art
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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.
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It is the nature of aphoristic thinking to be always in a state of concluding a bid to have the final word is inherent in all powerful phrase-making.
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With more people, there are more voices to tune out.
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Everything has changed and nothing is changed.
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The history of art is a sequence of successful transgressions.
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She felt herself needing more and more sleep. When she awoke in the morning, she thought of when she might lie down again - and when she would sleep. She started going to the movies.
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The danger, when not too dangerous, fascinate.
Susan Sontag
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An important job of the critic is to savage what is mediocre or meretricious.
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Ideas disturb the levelness of life
Susan Sontag
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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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I make an idol of my moral consciousness. My pursuit of the good is corrupted by the sin of idolatry.
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Surrealism is a bourgeois disaffection that its militants thought it universal is only one of the signs that it is typically bourgeois.
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We live in a world of copies and we're fascinated when we encounter the originals (in a museum, for instance).
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I'm not sure at all that literature should be studied on the university level. ... Why should people study books? Isn't it rather silly to study Pride and Prejudice. Either you get it or you don't.
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There are more and more taboos about calling something, anything, ugly.
Susan Sontag