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One set of messages of the society we live in is: Consume. Grow. Do what you want. Amuse yourselves.

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
Live
Amuse
Consumerism
Consume
Selfishness
Messages
Grow
Grows
Society

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All possibility of understanding is rooted in the ability to say no.
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Etymologically, 'patient' means sufferer.
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A work of art, so far as it is a work of art, cannot - whatever the artist's personal intention - advocate anything at all.
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The basic unit for contemporary art is not the idea, but the analysis of and extension of sensations.
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Cinema is a kind of pan-art. It can use, incorporate, engulf virtually any other art: the novel, poetry, theater, painting, sculpture, dance, music, architecture. Unlike opera, which is a (virtually) frozen art form, the cinema is and has been a fruitfully conservative medium of ideas and styles of emotions.
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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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The purpose of art is always, ultimately, to give pleasure - though our sensibilities may take time to catch up with the forms of pleasure that art in a given time may offer.
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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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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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The history of art is a sequence of successful transgressions.
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Reality has come to seem more and more like what we are shown by cameras.
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It's hard not to be afraid. Be less afraid.
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Any critic is entitled to wrong judgments, of course. But certain lapses of judgment indicate the radical failure of an entire sensibility.
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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.
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While a painting, even one that meets photographic standards of resemblance, is never more than the stating of an interpretation, a photograph is never less than the registering of an emanation (light waves reflected by objects) — a material vestige of its subject in a way that no painting can be.
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The only transformation that interests me is a total transformation - however minute
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Translation is the circulatory system of the world's literatures
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To photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them that they can never have.
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To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed. It means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge-and therefore, like power.
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There is an aggression implicit in every use of the camera.
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