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The basic unit for contemporary art is not the idea, but the analysis of and extension of sensations.

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
Units
Sensations
Contemporary
Analysis
Basic
Idea
Unit
Art
Extension
Ideas
Extensions

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To paraphrase several sages: Nobody can think and hit someone at the same time.
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Writing is a mysterious activity.
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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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One man thinks before he acts. Another man thinks after he acts. Each is of the opinon that the other thinks too much.
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art is the most general condition of the Past in the present. ... Perhaps no work of art is art. It can only become art, when it is part of the past. In this normative sense, a 'contemporary' work of art would be a contradiction - except so far as we can, in the present, assimilate the present to the past.
Susan Sontag
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The possession of a camera can inspire something akin to lust. And like all credible forms of lust, it cannot be satisfied.
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Nothing is mysterious, no human relation. Except love.
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The only transformation that interests me is a total transformation - however minute
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Our appreciations, it was felt, could be so much more inclusive if we said that something, instead of being beautiful, was 'interesting'.
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Mallarme said that everything in the world exists in order to end in a book. Today everything exists to end in a photograph.
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Gide and I have attained such perfect intellectual communion that I experience the appropriate labor pains for every thought he gives birth to!
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To take a 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.
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A good book is an education of the heart. It enlarges your sense of human possibility what human nature is of what happens in the world. It's a creator of inwardness.
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Taste tends to develop very unevenly. It's rare that the same person has good visual taste and good taste in people and taste in ideas.
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Currently intellectuals in Western Europe and North America are extremely demoralized and shaken by the rise of a virulent conservative tendency (which some have even joined).
Susan Sontag
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Left-wing movements have tended to be unisex, and asexual in their imagery. Right-wing movements, however puritanical and repressive the realities they usher in, have an erotic surface. Certainly Nazism is sexier than communism.
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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.
Susan Sontag
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Depression is melancholy minus its charms - the animation, the fits.
Susan Sontag
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What makes me feel strong? Being in love and work. I must work.
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I certainly identify myself as a feminist.
Susan Sontag