Susan Sontag Quotes on Art (10 Quotes)

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.

We live under continual threat of two equally fearful, but seemingly opposed, destinies unremitting banality and inconceivable terror. It is fantasy, served out in large rations by the popular arts, which allows most people to cope. . .

Much of modern art is devoted to lowering the threshold of what is terrible. By getting us used to what, formerly, we could not bear to see or hear, because it was too shocking, painful, or embarrassing, art changes morals.

In most modern instances, interpretation amounts to the philistine refusal to leave the work of art alone. Real art has the capacity to make us nervous. By reducing the work of art to its content and then interpreting that, one tames the work of art.

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.

Interpretation is the revenge of the intellectual upon art.

In the final analysis, style is art. And art is nothing more or less than various modes of stylized, dehumanized representation.

The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art - and, by analogy, our own experience - more, rather than less, real to us. The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means.

Science fiction films are not about science. They are about disaster, which is one of the oldest subjects of art.

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