A large part of the popularity and persuasiveness of psychology comes from its being a sublimated spiritualism: a secular, ostensibly scientific way of affirming the primacy of “spirit” over matter.
SUSAN SONTAG, Illness As Metaphor
Photography has become almost as widely practiced an amusement as sex and dancing -- which means that, like every mass art form, photography is not practiced by most people as an art. It is mainly a social rite, a defense against anxiety, and a tool of power.
SUSAN SONTAG, On Photography
Photography is an elegiac art, a twilight art. Most subjects photographed are, just by virtue of being photographed, touched with pathos.
SUSAN SONTAG, On Photography
War-making is one of the few activities that people are not supposed to view “realistically”; that is, with an eye to expense and practical outcome. In all-out war, expenditure is all-out, unprudent—war being defined as an emergency in which no sacrifice is excessive.
SUSAN SONTAG, AIDS and Its Metaphors
Ambition if it feeds at all, does so on the ambition of others.
SUSAN SONTAG, The Benefactor
Surrealism in painting amounted to little more than the contents of a meagerly stocked dream world: a few witty fantasies, mostly wet dreams and agoraphobic nightmares.
SUSAN SONTAG, On Photography
Surrealism can only deliver a reactionary judgment; can make out of history only an accumulation of oddities, a joke, a death trip.
SUSAN SONTAG, On Photography
Boredom is just the reverse side of fascination: both depend on being outside rather than inside a situation, and one leads to the other.
SUSAN SONTAG, "America, Seen Through Photographs, Darkly," On Photography
|
