Susan Sontag
Susan Sontag
Susan Sontagwas an American writer, filmmaker, teacher and political activist. She published her first major work, the essay "Notes on 'Camp'", in 1964. Her best-known works include On Photography, Against Interpretation, Styles of Radical Will, The Way We Live Now, Illness as Metaphor, Regarding the Pain of Others, The Volcano Lover and In America...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionAuthor
Date of Birth16 January 1933
CountryUnited States of America
art artistic beauty decay durable extremely moral morality nowhere physical rapidly tendency
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.
answers destroy questions
The only interesting answers are those which destroy the questions
asthmatic bank beastly bleeding city close cosmic data fairly jungle neither nor printed
This city is neither a jungle nor the moon. . . . In long shot: a cosmic smudge, a conglomerate of bleeding energies. Close up, it is a fairly legible printed circuit, a transistorized labyrinth of beastly tracks, a data bank for asthmatic voice-prints.
nostalgic
But when we are nostalgic, we take pictures
becoming-one ironic world
Though collecting quotations could be considered as merely an ironic mimetism -- victimless collecting, as it were... in a world that is well on its way to becoming one vast quarry, the collector becomes someone engaged in a pious work of salvage. The course of modern history having already sapped the traditions and shattered the living wholes in which precious objects once found their place, the collector may now in good conscience go about excavating the choicer, more emblematic fragments.
mass-culture age answers
Detachment is the prerogative of an elite; and as the dandy is the nineteenth century's surrogate for the aristocrat in matters ofculture, so Camp is the modern dandyism. Camp is the answer to the problem: how to be a dandy in the age of mass culture.
worst-case-scenario needs taste
The taste for worst-case scenarios reflects the need to master fear of what is felt to be uncontrollable. It also expresses an imaginative complicity with disaster.
imagination growing disease
Growing older is mainly an ordeal of the imagination-a moral disease, a social pathology...
world-suffering suffering degrade
It is not suffering as such that is most deeply feared but suffering that degrades.
imagination structure pornography
Experiences aren't pornographic; only images and representations - structures of the imagination - are.
most-amazing idealism phenomenon
The single most amazing phenomenon is the discrediting of idealism.
unjust illness metaphor
Illnesses have always been used as metaphors to enliven charges that a society was corrupt or unjust.