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. Interpretation makes art manageable, conformable.
Susan Sontag
Related When the enemy is relaxed, make them toil. When full, starve them. When settled, make them move. SUN TZU Art is in the eye of the beholder, and everyone will have their own interpretation. E.A. BUCCHIANERI An educated person's ideas of Art are drwan naturally from what Art has been, whereas the new work o... OSCAR WILDE I always like to leave art and music open to interpretation. DAN REYNOLDS The work of art is to dominate the spectator: the spectator is not to dominate the work of art. OSCAR WILDE When a man takes one step toward God, God takes more steps toward that man than there are sands in t... THE WORK OF THE CHARIOT The only valid rule for a work of art is that it be true to itself. MARTY RUBIN It used to happen, and still happens, to me to take no pleasure in a work of art at the first sight ... JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE We should always remember that sensitiveness and emotion constitute the real content of a work of ar... MAURICE RAVEL The interpretation of dreams is a great art. PARACELSUS The art of interpretation is not to play what is written. PABLO CASALS One should either be a work of art, or wear a work of art. OSCAR WILDE Interpretation is the revenge of the intellectual upon art. SUSAN SONTAG Interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art. SUSAN SONTAG Hard to restrain, unstable is this mind; it flits wherever it lists. Good it is to control the mind.... GAUTAMA BUDDHA It is one of the primary motives of modern art that it wants to abolish the distance which the viewe... HANS-GEORG GADAMER I could not distinguish one modern work of art from another, but he taught me the difference between... SAMUEL BECKETT The thing about art for me is that you can go on theorising your work forever, because it's open... TAKESHI KITANO I am the foremost collector of velvet Elvii in the city of Chicago," I said at once. "El... JIM BUTCHER Never judge a work of art by its defects. WASHINGTON ALLSTON Never judge a work of art by its defects WASHINGTON ALLSTON Art is work, to sell it is art. UNKNOWN One great work of art inspired by another. DAN BROWN The modern work of art, as I have said, is a symbol. HERBERT READ The greatest work of art created first by god and then by man, is the creation of life. The whole pr... BETHANY JANE ANDREWS HOEY The work of art is brought into the world without there being a need for it. The house satisfies a r... ADOLF LOOS People are intrigued by things that are a work of art. I think they (the daggers) are works of art. BARRY WATSON “The artist must be in the art. If the art does not reflect the work of the artist, then it was cr... AARON CHAPMAN What is essential in a work of art is that it should rise far above the realm of personal life and s... CARL GUSTAV JUNG Behind every work of art lies the enormous pretension of exhibiting one's vision of the world. If su... AMéLIE NOTHOMB In spite of the deep-seated craving for love, almost everything else is considered to be more import... ERICH FROMM Art is the path of the creator to his work. RALPH WALDO EMERSON Every plain wall deserves a piece of work, so why not cover it with a smile? SHAWN LUKAS Madness is the absolute break with the work of art; it forms the constitutive moment of abolition, w... MICHEL FOUCAULT Artists today think of everything they do as a work of art. It is important to forget about what you... ANDREW WYETH Fine art, that exists for itself alone, is art in a final state of impotence. If nobody, including t... ANGELA CARTER A work of art which did not begin in emotion is not art. PAUL CEZANNE A work of art which did not begin in emotion is not art. PAUL CéZANNE How should I know?" said Alice, surprised at her own courage. "It's no business of mine." The Q... LEWIS CARROLL Art is life's dream interpretation. OTTO RANK Classic art was the art of necessity: modern romantic art bears the stamp of caprice and chance. RALPH WALDO EMERSON Classic art was the art of necessity: modern romantic art bears the stamp of caprice and chance. MAX EASTMAN Every great work of art has two faces, one toward its own time and one toward the future, toward ete... DANIEL BARENBOIM To create a work of art is to create the world. WASSILY KANDINSKY It is difficult to make political art work. THOM YORKE Any work that aspires, however humbly, to the condition of art should carry its justification in eve... JOSEPH CONRAD Any work that aspires, however humbly, to the condition of art should carry its justification in ev... JOSEPH CONRAD The use of the term art medium is, to say the least, misleading, for it is the artist that creates a... EDWARD STEICHEN The unfortunate thing is that, sometimes, we slip, but, fortunately, consciously or unconsciously, w... ERNEST AGYEMANG YEBOAH Every season has its own art and the art of autumn is to bewitch the people! MEHMET MURAT ILDAN The best introduction by far to representation of the human figure in art. The Nude is a beautifully... CAMILLE ANNA PAGLIA To truly perfect the business of art, one has to perfect the art of business. /USER/JAMAAL+ROLLE/MY_QUOTES/1 To know how to grow old is the master work of wisdom, and one of the most difficult chapters in th... HENRI FREDERIC AMIEL To know how to grow old is the master work of wisdom, and one of the most difficult chapters in the ... HENRI FREDERIC AMIEL To know how to grow old is the master work of wisdom, and one of the most difficult chapters in the ... HERMAN MELVILLE This is how one feels in the presence of a work of art. WILLIAM MAXWELL The archive is particularly interesting because Burroughs clearly intended it, primarily through its... ISAAC GEWIRTZ If there has been anything in the history of popular music which could be described as a work of art... JOHN PEEL Your life today is the result of a series of decisions you made that have caused you to arrive where... CHRIS PRENTISS A strong personal philosophy does more than sustain us through the tragedies of life. It also stains... CHRIS PRENTISS The answers are never "out there." All the answers are "in there," inside you, waiting to be discove... CHRIS PRENTISS The house has to serve comfort. The work of art is revolutionary; the house is conservative. ADOLF LOOS Serious art has been the work of individual artists whose art has had nothing to do with style becau... FRANZ MARC When we started with our little family business to keep his art alive the first place we went to put... KRIS CAMERON The philistine provides the best definition of art. Anything that makes him rage is first class. LOUIS DUDEK The mediator of the inexpressible is the work of art. JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE The work of art is a scream of freedom. CHRISTO The human body is the best work of art. JESS C. SCOTT It would be both an identical work of art only by virtue of its difference. The same but different, ... JOHNNY RICH Our life is our masterpiece, it's up to us on how we paint our story. It's up to us how we see the s... NATHANIEL E. QUIMADA Even in modern art, artists have used methods based on calculation, inasmuch as these elements, alon... MAX BILL It is our art that has an opportunity to leave a footprint in the sand. They don't wrap fish in our ... HUGH NEWELL JACOBSEN Here is what I was trying to figure out: how a miracle happens. A great work of art -- something tha... MASHA GESSEN Art classes teach how to make art, but the essence, of art is still the essence of you. JIM GENOVESE The greatest work of art is a blank page and a pencil as there are infinite possibilities ADAM MCCALLION Every work of art is the child of its age and, in many cases, the mother of our emotions. It follows... WASSILY KANDINSKY The good moral work of art should have all the qualities that a good amoral work of art should have,... NORMAN MCLAREN Art is not in some far-off place. A work of Art is the expression of a man's whole personality, sens... SHINICHI SUZUKI Another year is ending, but something is pending ERNEST AGYEMANG YEBOAH I would want students to be exposed to the idea that these are works of art just like a painting or ... CHRIS WILSON Något av det viktigaste i all konst: att överlåta en anständig del åt läsaren, betraktaren, de... GUNNAR EKELöF Perhaps what matters is not the human pain or joy at all but, rather, the play of shadow and light o... VLADIMIR NABOKOV Some people flinch when you talk about art in the context of the needs of society thinking you are i... CHINUA ACHEBE A fine work of art - music, dance, painting, story - has the power to silence the chatter in the min... ROBERT MCKEE I am truly excited about the quality of these three major sculptures, but also about the diversity o... LEWIS SHARP Failure is a work of art. MICHAEL CAPORALE Conceptual art became the liberating idea that gave the art of the next 40 years its real impetus. SOL LEWITT A work of art has no importance whatever to society. It is only important to the individual. VLADIMIR NABOKOV The work of art is always unfaithful to its creator... Art lays at a higher level; it says something... OCTAVIO PAZ We all agree now - by "we" I mean intelligent people under sixty - that a work of art is like a rose... CLIVE BELL The history of modern art is also the history of the progressive loss of art's audience. Art has... PAUL GAUGUIN Make it new is the message not just of modern art but of modern consumerism, of which modern art is ... CHRISTOPHER LASCH In happy hours, nature appears to us one with art; art perfected, -- the work of genius. And the ind... RALPH WALDO EMERSON Creativity is a work of art and art is the closest thing to magic! A little mixture of creativity an... TEGAN GENEVIEVE JONES The work of art may have a moral effect, but to demand moral purpose from the artist is to make him ... JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE Art doesn't spring from the muses alone, but from hard work. TOM RACHMAN When a man gives you a rose what you see may not be what he intends. You may think he sees you as de... PATRICK ROTHFUSS Perpetual modernness is the measure of merit in every work of art. RALPH WALDO EMERSON After all, what is art? Art is the creative process and it goes through all fields. Einstein’s the... PIET HEIN The staircase will remain as a permanent work of art. IRVIN LIPPMAN
More Susan Sontag
A fiction about soft or easy deaths is part of the mythology of most diseases that are not considere... SUSAN SONTAG The writer is either a practicing recluse or a delinquent, guilt-ridden one; or both. Usually both. SUSAN SONTAG The best emotions to write out of are anger and fear or dread. The least energizing emotion to write... SUSAN SONTAG Lying is the most simple form of self-defence. -Susan Sontag. SUSAN SONTAG A large part of the popularity and persuasiveness of psychology comes from its being a sublimated sp... SUSAN SONTAG The camera makes everyone a tourist in other people's reality, and eventually in one's own. SUSAN SONTAG It's a pleasure to share one's memories. Everything remembered is dear, endearing, touching, precio... SUSAN SONTAG It is the nature of aphoristic thinking to be always in a state of concluding; a bid to have the fin... SUSAN SONTAG Although none of the rules for becoming more alive is valid, it is healthy to keep on formulating th... 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SUSAN SONTAG Science fiction films are not about science. They are about disaster, which is one of the oldest sub... SUSAN SONTAG What pornography is really about, ultimately, isn't sex but death. SUSAN SONTAG What pornographic literature does is precisely to drive a wedge between one's existence as a full hu... SUSAN SONTAG Jews and homosexuals are the outstanding creative minorities in contemporary urban culture. Creative... SUSAN SONTAG I envy paranoids; they actually feel people are paying attention to them. SUSAN SONTAG Ours is a culture based on excess, on overproduction; the result is a steady loss of sharpness in ou... SUSAN SONTAG Camp is a vision of the world in terms of style -- but a particular kind of style. It is love of the... SUSAN SONTAG Industrial societies turn their citizens into image-junkies; it is the most irresistible form of men... SUSAN SONTAG Victims suggest innocence. And innocence, by the inexorable logic that governs all relational terms,... SUSAN SONTAG Depression is melancholy minus its charms -- the animation, the fits. SUSAN SONTAG We live under continual threat of two equally fearful, but seemingly opposed, destinies: unremitting... SUSAN SONTAG A large part of the popularity and persuasiveness of psychology comes from its being a sublimated sp... SUSAN SONTAG Cancer patients are lied to, not just because the disease is (or is thought to be) a death sentence,... SUSAN SONTAG AIDS occupies such a large part in our awareness because of what it has been taken to represent. It ... SUSAN SONTAG AIDS obliges people to think of sex as having, possibly, the direst consequences: suicide. Or murder... SUSAN SONTAG I do not think white America is committed to granting equality to the American Negro... this is a pa... SUSAN SONTAG Though collecting quotations could be considered as merely an ironic mimetism SUSAN SONTAG The camera makes everyone a tourist in other people's reality, and eventually in one's own. SUSAN SONTAG Tamed as it may be, sexuality remains one of the demonic forces in human consciousness -- pushing us... SUSAN SONTAG Fear of sexuality is the new, disease-sponsored register of the universe of fear in which everyone n... SUSAN SONTAG The best emotions to write out of are anger and fear or dread. . . . The least energizing emotion ... SUSAN SONTAG What we need is to use what we have. SUSAN SONTAG Sanity is a cozy lie. SUSAN SONTAG It is not suffering as such that is most deeply feared but suffering that degrades. SUSAN SONTAG In the final analysis, style is art. And art is nothing more or less than various modes of stylized,... SUSAN SONTAG The discovery of the good taste of bad taste can be very liberating. The man who insists on high and... SUSAN SONTAG Taste has no system and no proofs. SUSAN SONTAG The hard truth is that what may be acceptable in elite culture may not be acceptable in mass culture... SUSAN SONTAG One set of messages of the society we live in is: Consume. Grow. Do what you want. Amuse yourselves.... SUSAN SONTAG What is most beautiful in virile men is something feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine women... SUSAN SONTAG The truth is always something that is told, not something that is known. If there were no speaking o... SUSAN SONTAG I don't want to express alienation. It isn't what I feel. I'm interested in various kind... SUSAN SONTAG Travel becomes a strategy for accumulating photographs. SUSAN SONTAG The past itself, as historical change continues to accelerate, has become the most surreal of subjec... SUSAN SONTAG The camera makes everyone a tourist in other people's reality, and eventually in one's own. SUSAN SONTAG To take a photograph is to participate in another person's mortality, vulnerability, mutability.... SUSAN SONTAG As photographs give people an imaginary possession of a past that is unreal, they also help people t... SUSAN SONTAG Life is not significant details, illuminated by a flash, fixed forever. Photographs are. SUSAN SONTAG The truth is balance. However the opposite of truth, which is unbalance, may not be a lie. SUSAN SONTAG The life of the creative man is lead, directed and controlled by boredom. Avoiding boredom is one of... SUSAN SONTAG I was not looking for my dreams to interpret my life, but rather for my life to interpret my dreams. SUSAN SONTAG The only interesting answers are those that destroy the questions. SUSAN SONTAG Interpretation is the revenge of the intellectual upon art. SUSAN SONTAG Mallarme said that everything in the world exists in order to end in a book. Today everything exists... SUSAN SONTAG Silence remains, inescapably, a form of speech. SUSAN SONTAG What is the most beautiful in virile men is something feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine w... SUSAN SONTAG Lying is the most simple form of self-defence. SUSAN SONTAG It is not altogether wrong to say that there is no such thing as a bad photograph - only less intere... SUSAN SONTAG Surrealism is a bourgeois disaffection; that its militants thought it universal is only one of the s... SUSAN SONTAG For those who live neither with religious consolations about death nor with a sense of death (or of ... SUSAN SONTAG The love of the famous, like all strong passions, is quite abstract. Its intensity can be measured m... SUSAN SONTAG To paraphrase several sages: Nobody can think and hit someone at the same time. SUSAN SONTAG The fear of becoming old is born of the recognition that one is not living now the life that one wis... SUSAN SONTAG Depression is melancholy minus its charms - the animation, the fits. SUSAN SONTAG Authoritarian political ideologies have a vested interest in promoting fear, a sense of the imminenc... SUSAN SONTAG Existence is no more than the precarious attainment of relevance in an intensely mobile flux of past... SUSAN SONTAG Mozart, Pascal, Boolean algebra, Shakespeare, parliamentary government, baroque churches, Newton, th... SUSAN SONTAG My library is an archive of longings. SUSAN SONTAG We like to stress the commonness of heroes. Essences seem undemocratic. We feel oppressed by the cal... SUSAN SONTAG The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art - and, by analogy, our own exper... SUSAN SONTAG We are told we must choose — the old or the new. In fact, we must choose both. What is a life if n... SUSAN SONTAG Religion is probably, after sex, the second oldest resource which human beings have available to the... SUSAN SONTAG Volume depends precisely on the writer's having been able to sit in a room every day, year after yea... SUSAN SONTAG I was not looking for my dreams to interpret my life, but rather for my life to interpret my dreams SUSAN SONTAG I don’t care about someone being intelligent; any situation between people, when they are really h... SUSAN SONTAG Fewer and fewer Americans possess objects that have a patina, old furniture, grandparents pots and p... SUSAN SONTAG Using a camera appeases the anxiety which the work-driven feel about not working when they are on va... SUSAN SONTAG Theories that diseases are caused by mental states and can be cured by will power, are always an ind... SUSAN SONTAG Much of modern art is devoted to lowering the threshold of what is terrible. By getting us used to w... SUSAN SONTAG Depression is melancholy minus its charms. SUSAN SONTAG Victims suggest innocence. And innocence, by the inexorable logic that governs all relational term... SUSAN SONTAG The standard that a society should actually embody its own professed principles is a utopian one, in... SUSAN SONTAG Fewer and fewer Americans possess objects that have a patina, old furniture, grandparents pots and p... SUSAN SONTAG Interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art. Even more. It is the revenge of the intelle... SUSAN SONTAG A family's photograph album is generally about the extended family and, often, is all that remai... SUSAN SONTAG I do not think white America is committed to granting equality to the American Negro. This is a pass... SUSAN SONTAG Camp is a vision of the world in terms of style-but a particular style. It is the love of the exagge... SUSAN SONTAG 'Camp' is a vision of the world in terms of style - but a particular style. It is the love o... SUSAN SONTAG It is not the position, but the disposition. SUSAN SONTAG The only interesting answers are those which destroy the questions SUSAN SONTAG Making social comment is an artificial place for an artist to start from. If an artist is touched by... SUSAN SONTAG To take a photograph is to participate in another person's mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Pre... SUSAN SONTAG Photographs objectify: they turn an event or a person into something that can be possessed. SUSAN SONTAG Is there an antidote to the perennial seductiveness of war? And is this a question a woman is more l... SUSAN SONTAG Narratives can make us understand. Photographs do something else: they haunt us. SUSAN SONTAG All memory is individual, unreproducible - it dies with each person. What is called collective memor... SUSAN SONTAG The ideology of capitalism makes us all into connoisseurs of liberty - of the indefinite expansion o... SUSAN SONTAG American "energy." . . is the energy of violence, of free-floating resentment and anxiety unleashed ... SUSAN SONTAG Today everything exists to end in a photograph. SUSAN SONTAG All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or t... SUSAN SONTAG Boredom is just the reverse side of fascination: both depend on being outside rather than inside a s... SUSAN SONTAG Illness is the night-side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citiz... SUSAN SONTAG Anthropology has always struggled with an intense, fascinated repulsion towards its subject. . . . [... SUSAN SONTAG People don't become inured to what they are shown - if that's the right way to describe what happens... SUSAN SONTAG So far as we feel sympathy, we feel we are not accomplices to what caused the suffering. Our sympath... SUSAN SONTAG All struggle, all resistance is -- must be -- concrete. And all struggle has a global resonance. If ... SUSAN SONTAG To suffer is one thing; another thing is living with the photographed images of suffering, which doe... SUSAN SONTAG Life is not about significant details, illuminated a flash, fixed forever. Photographs ar... SUSAN SONTAG Desire has no history... SUSAN SONTAG Needing to have reality confirmed and experience enhanced by photographs is an aesthetic consumerism... SUSAN SONTAG Photographs are a way of imprisoning reality...One can't possess reality, one can possess images--on... SUSAN SONTAG Most people in this society who aren't actively mad are, at best, reformed or potential lunatics... SUSAN SONTAG Every culture has its southerners -- people who work as little as they can, preferring to dance, dri... SUSAN SONTAG How much self-love comes in the guise of selfless devotion! SUSAN SONTAG As objects of contemplation, images of the atrocious can answer to several different needs. To steel... SUSAN SONTAG Today is such a time, when the project of interpretation is largely reactionary, stifling. Like the ... SUSAN SONTAG I haven't been everywhere, but it's on my list. SUSAN SONTAG Each of us carries a room within ourselves, waiting to be furnished and peopled, and if you listen c... SUSAN SONTAG [O]ne person's 'barbarian' is another person's 'just doing what everybody else is doing. SUSAN SONTAG Do stuff. Be clenched, curious. Not waiting for inspiration's shove or society's kiss on your forehe... SUSAN SONTAG Detachment is the prerogative of an elite; and as the dandy is the nineteenth century's surrogate fo... SUSAN SONTAG A large part of the popularity and persuasiveness of psychology comes from its being a sublimated sp... SUSAN SONTAG Lying is an elementary means of self-defense. SUSAN SONTAG Perhaps it is our perennial fate to be surprised by the simultaneity of events, by the sheer extensi... SUSAN SONTAG Rules of taste enforce structures of power. SUSAN SONTAG Read a lot. Expect something big, something exalting or deepening from a book. No book is worth read... SUSAN SONTAG All photographs are memento mori. SUSAN SONTAG With the modern diseases (once TB, now cancer) the romantic idea that the disease expresses the char... SUSAN SONTAG The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art / and, by analogy, our own exper... SUSAN SONTAG The freakish is no longer a private zone, difficult of access. People who are bizarre, in sexual dis... SUSAN SONTAG Photographs that depict suffering shouldn't be beautiful, as captions shouldn't moralize, SUSAN SONTAG Authoritarian political ideologies have a vested interest in promoting fear, a sense of the imminenc... SUSAN SONTAG This city is neither a jungle nor the moon. . . . In long shot: a cosmic smudge, a conglomerate of b... SUSAN SONTAG The past itself, as historical change continues to accelerate, has become the most surreal of subjec... SUSAN SONTAG It's fantastic knowing you're going to die; it really makes having priorities and trying to follow t... SUSAN SONTAG A photograph is not only an image (as a painting is an image), an interpretation of the real; it is ... SUSAN SONTAG The fact that illness is associated with the poor --who are, from the perspective of the privileged,... SUSAN SONTAG The Way We Live Now SUSAN SONTAG Of course the movies are going to be the more visible, more high profile, for the simple reason that... SUSAN SONTAG In the final analysis, ''style'' is art. And art is nothing more or less than various modes of styli... SUSAN SONTAG He who despises himself esteems himself as a self-despiser. SUSAN SONTAG With more people, there are more voices to tune out. SUSAN SONTAG Interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art. SUSAN SONTAG Societies need to have one illness which becomes identified with evil, and attaches blame to its "vi... SUSAN SONTAG Al forms of consensus about ''great'' books and ''perennial'' problems, once stabilized, tend to det... SUSAN SONTAG The aestheticizing tendency of photography is such that the medium which conveys distress ends by ne... SUSAN SONTAG It seems positively unnatural to travel without taking a camera along... The very activity of taking... SUSAN SONTAG But maybe they were barbarians. Maybe this is what most barbarians look like. They look like everybo... SUSAN SONTAG Dissimulation, secretiveness, appear a necessity to the melancholic. He has complex, often veiled re... SUSAN SONTAG It hurts to love. It's like giving yourself to be flayed and knowing that at any moment the other pe... SUSAN SONTAG One feature of the usual script for plague: the disease invariably comes from somewhere else. The na... SUSAN SONTAG The basic unit for contemporary art is not the idea, but the analysis of and extension of sensations... SUSAN SONTAG [Perhaps this is a good thing. And potentially dangerous for a novelist. The dangers are obvious. A ... SUSAN SONTAG Guns have metamorphosed into cameras in this earnest comedy, the ecology safari, because nature has ... SUSAN SONTAG The taste for quotations (and for the juxtaposition of incongruous quotations) is a Surrealist taste... SUSAN SONTAG Books are funny little portable pieces of thought. SUSAN SONTAG Ours is a culture based on excess, on overproduction; the result is a steady loss of sharpness in ou... SUSAN SONTAG What is most beautiful in virile men is something feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine women... SUSAN SONTAG Perversity is the muse of modern literature SUSAN SONTAG What pornographic literature does is precisely to drive a wedge between one's existence as a sexual ... SUSAN SONTAG It's a pleasure to share one's memories. Everything remembered is dear, endearing, touching, preciou... SUSAN SONTAG My idea of a writer: someone interested in 'everything,' SUSAN SONTAG I envy paranoids; they actually feel people are paying attention to them SUSAN SONTAG The quality of American life is an insult to the possibilities of human growth. . . the pollution of... SUSAN SONTAG Most people in this society who aren't actively mad are, at best, reformed or potential lunatics. SUSAN SONTAG A great private collection is a material concentrate that continually stimulates, that overexcites. ... SUSAN SONTAG