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.
More Quotes from Susan Sontag:
Sadomasochism has always been the furthest reach of the sexual experience when sex becomes most purely sexual, that is, severed from personhood, from relationships, from love. It should not be surprising that it has become attached to Nazi symbolism...Susan Sontag
The basic unit for contemporary art is not the idea, but the analysis of and extension of sensations.
Susan Sontag
Illness is the night-side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick.
Susan Sontag
Science fiction films are not about science. They are about disaster, which is one of the oldest subjects of art.
Susan Sontag
The writer is either a practising recluse or a delinquent, guilt-ridden one or both. Usually both.
Susan Sontag
Religion is probably, after sex, the second oldest resource which human beings have available to them for blowing their minds.
Susan Sontag
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I don't have my pilot's licence anymore, but I'm still very political.
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But I think you can make fun of anything as long as it's funny enough.
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