Quotes from Susan Sontag

Camp is art that proposes itself seriously, but cannot be taken altogether seriously because it is 'too much.

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.

Art is not consciousness per se, but rather its antidote- evolved from within consciousness itself.

The idea of content in art is today merely a hindrance, a nuisance, a subtle or not so subtle philistinism.

Art is seduction, not rape.

... one of art photography's most vigorous enterprises--[is] concentrating on victims, on the unfortunate--but without the compassionate purpose that such a project is expected to serve.

Unfortunately, moral beauty in art - like physical beauty in a person - is extremely perishable.

The moral pleasure in art, as well as the moral service that art performs, consists in the intelligent gratification of consciousness.

Transparence is the highest, most liberating value in art - and in criticism - today. Transparence means experiencing the luminousness of the thing in itself, of things being what they are.

In a culture whose already classical dilemma is the hypertrophy of the intellect at the expense of energy and sensual capability, interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art.

Self-exposure is commendable in art only when it is of a quality and complexity that allows other people to learn about themselves from it.

As industrialization provided social uses for the operations of the photographer, so the reaction against these uses reinforced the self-consciousness of photography-as-art.

Interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art.

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

The most potent elements in a work of art are, often, its silences.

The work of art itself is . . . a vibrant, magical, and exemplary object which returns us to the world in some way more open and enriched.

A work of art, so far as it is a work of art, cannot - whatever the artist's personal intention - advocate anything at all.

Art is not only about something; it is something. A work of art is a thing in the world, not just a text or commentary on the world.

Loeb has been doing wonderfully patient work, exploring the American conscience from the inside. I regard him as something of a national treasure.

The writers or artists I write about are not necessarily those I care most about (Shakespeare is still my favourite writer) but those whose work I feel has been neglected.

In photographing dwarfs, you don't get majesty & beauty. You get dwarfs.

Most people in this society who aren't actively mad are, at best, reformed or potential lunatics.

Societies need to have one illness which becomes identified with evil, and attaches blame to its victims.

Victims suggest innocence. And innocence, by the inexorable logic that governs all relational terms, suggests guilt.