Susan Sontag on Art by Wendy Macnoughton
All great art contains at its center contemplation, a dynamic contemplation.
Modern aesthetics is crippled by its dependence upon the concept of ‘beauty.’ As if art were ‘about’ beauty—as science is ‘about’ truth!
Art is a form of nourishment (of consciousness, the spirit)
Susan Sontag was an American writer, filmmaker, teacher and political activist. She wrote extensively about photography, culture and media, AIDS and illness, human rights, and communism and leftist ideology.
Quotes
Ours is an age which consciously pursues health, and yet only believes in the reality of sickness. The truths we respect are those born of affliction. We measure truth in terms of the cost to the writer in suffering — rather than by the standard of an objective truth to which a writer's words correspond. Each of our truths must have a martyr.
The truth is always something that is told, not something that is known. If there were no speaking or writing, there would be no truth about anything. There would only be what is.
On Photography
In 1977, Sontag published a series of essays On Photography.
On Photography
In 1977, Sontag published a series of essays On Photography.
being educated
by photographs is not like being educated by older, more artisanal
images. For one thing, there are a great many more images around,
claiming our attention. The inventory started in 1839 and since
then just about everything has been photographed
The method especially appeals to people handicapped by a ruthless work ethic – Germans, Japanese and Americans. Using a camera appeases the anxiety which the work driven feel about not working when they are on vacation and supposed to be having fun. They have something to do that is like a friendly imitation of work: they can take pictures.
Sontag writes in her essay that the convenience of modern photography has created an over abundance of visual material and "just about everything has been photographed"
If America is the culmination of Western white civilization, as everyone from the Left to the Right declares, then there must be something terribly wrong with Western white civilization. This is a painful truth; few of us want to go that far. … The truth is that Mozart, Pascal, Boolean algebra, Shakespeare, parliamentary government, baroque churches, Newton, the emancipation of women, Kant, Marx, Balanchine ballets, et al., don't redeem what this particular civilization has wrought upon the world. The white race is the cancer of human history; it is the white race and it alone—its ideologies and inventions—which eradicates autonomous civilizations wherever it spreads, which has upset the ecological balance of the planet, which now threatens the very existence of life itself.
The Paris Review
"I know I was self-publishing when I was about nine; I started a four-page monthly newspaper, which I hectographed (a very primitive method of duplication) in about twenty copies and sold for five cents to the neighbors"
“My subject is war, and anything about any war that does not show the appalling concreteness of destruction and death is a dangerous lie.”
If America is the culmination of Western white civilization, as everyone from the Left to the Right declares, then there must be something terribly wrong with Western white civilization. This is a painful truth; few of us want to go that far. … The truth is that Mozart, Pascal, Boolean algebra, Shakespeare, parliamentary government, baroque churches, Newton, the emancipation of women, Kant, Marx, Balanchine ballets, et al., don't redeem what this particular civilization has wrought upon the world. The white race is the cancer of human history; it is the white race and it alone—its ideologies and inventions—which eradicates autonomous civilizations wherever it spreads, which has upset the ecological balance of the planet, which now threatens the very existence of life itself.
The Paris Review
"I know I was self-publishing when I was about nine; I started a four-page monthly newspaper, which I hectographed (a very primitive method of duplication) in about twenty copies and sold for five cents to the neighbors"
“My subject is war, and anything about any war that does not show the appalling concreteness of destruction and death is a dangerous lie.”
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