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The moral pleasure in art, as well as the moral service that art performs, consists in the intelligent gratification of consciousness.
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
Intelligent
Consciousness
Pleasure
Moral
Art
Performs
Wells
Gratification
Well
Consists
Service
More quotes by Susan Sontag
the appetite for thinking must be regulated, as all sensible people know, for it may stifle one's life.
Susan Sontag
Indeed, the very first acknowledgment (as far as I am aware) of the attraction of mutilated bodies occurs in a founding description of mental conflict. It is a passage in The Republic, Book IV, where Plato’s Socrates describes how our reason may be overwhelmed by an unworthy desire, which drives the self to become angry with a part of its nature.
Susan Sontag
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.
Susan Sontag
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.
Susan Sontag
With more people, there are more voices to tune out.
Susan Sontag
Courage is morally neutral.
Susan Sontag
Marriage is a sort of tacit hunting in couples. The world all in couples, each couple in its own little house, watching its own little interests and stewing in its own little privacy - it's the most repulsive thing in the world. One's got to get rid of the exclusiveness of married love.
Susan Sontag
Ours is an age which consciously pursues health, and yet only believes in the reality of sickness.
Susan Sontag
Mallarme said that everything in the world exists in order to end in a book. Today everything exists to end in a photograph.
Susan Sontag
In America, the photographer is not simply the person who records the past, but the one who invents it.
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The two pioneering forces of modern sensibility are Jewish moral seriousness and homosexual aestheticism and irony.
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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
People robbed of their past seem to make the most fervent picture takers, at home and abroad.
Susan Sontag
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.
Susan Sontag
Needing to have reality confirmed and experience enhanced by photographs is an aesthetic consumerism to which everyone is now addicted. Industrial societies turn their citizens into image-junkies it is the most irresistible form of mental pollution.
Susan Sontag
A work of art, so far as it is a work of art, cannot - whatever the artist's personal intention - advocate anything at all.
Susan Sontag
I want to save my soul, that timid wind.
Susan Sontag
taste governs every free - as opposed to rote - human response. Nothing is more decisive. There is taste in people, visual taste, taste in emotion - and there is taste in acts, taste in morality. Intelligence, as well, is really a kind of taste: taste in ideas.
Susan Sontag
Art is a form of consciousness.
Susan Sontag
I do not think white America is committed to granting equality to the American Negro... this is a passionately racist country it will continue to be so in the foreseeable future.
Susan Sontag