Susan Sontag Quotes

What is art but a way of seeing?

The ultimate justification of the work of art is to help the spectator to become a work of art himself.

The object of art like every other product creates a public which is sensitive to art and enjoys beauty.

Poetry and art nourish the soul of the world with the flavor-filled substances of beauty, wisdom and truth.

Art always serves beauty, and beauty is the joy of possessing form, and form is the key to organic life since no living thing can exist without it.

Now Art, used collectively for painting, sculpture, architecture and music, is the mediatress between, and reconciler of, nature and man. It is, therefore, the power of humanizing nature, of infusing the thoughts and passions of man into everything which is the object of his contemplation.

Beauty is not a means, not a way of furthering a thing in the world. It is a result; it belongs to ordering, to form, to aftereffect.

But ‘art’ is not anything serious or exclusive: it is the smell of oil paint, Henri Murger’s Vie de Boheme, corduroy trousers, the operatic Italian model: but the poetry, above all, of linseed oil and turpentine.

art, n. This word has no definition.

This was my first encounter with art as art (he saw 'Pinky' painted by Sir Thomas Lawrence and 'The Blue Boy" painted by Thomas Gainborough).. ..somebody actually MADE those paintings.. ..(it) was the first time I realized you could be an artist.

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 craft: all art is always and essentially a work of craft: but in the true work of art, before the craft and after it, is some essential durable core of being, which is what the craft works on, and shows, and sets free. The statue in the stone. How does the artist find that, see it, before it's visible? That is a real question.

Art has a unique capacity to take one or other facet of the message and translate it into colors, shapes and sounds which nourish the intuition of those who look and listen.

Art is what we do. Culture is what is done to us. A photograph of an art object is not the art object. An essay about an artist's work is not the artist's work.

The closer and more completely you can come to explaining what a work of art means, the less like art it seems.

The first impression of a work of art is its otherness from reality.

I have no evangelical feelings about art at all. I despise art education. Art doesn't lend itself to education. There is no knowledge there. It's a set of propositions about how things should look.

The whole point of art, as far as I’m concerned, is that art doesn’t make any difference. And that’s why it’s important. Take film: you can have quite extreme emotional experiences watching a movie, but they stop as soon as you walk out of the cinema. You can see people being hurt, but even though you feel those things strongly, you know they’re not real.

Those who are not very concerned with art want poems or pictures to record for them something they already know - as one might want a picture of a place he loves.

The object of science is knowledge; the objects of art are works. In art, truth is the means to an end; in science, it is the only end. Hence the practical arts are not to be classed among the sciences

There is no surer method of evading the world than by following Art, and no surer method of linking oneself to it than by Art.

Art is an invention of aesthetics, which in turn is an invention of philosophers... What we call art is a game.

Art is the objectification of feeling, and the subjectification of nature.

Art is the imposing of a pattern on experience, and our aesthetic enjoyment is recognition of the pattern.

I think it was Roger Fry who first coined what he took to be a final definition of a work of art, whether it was a painting, building, poem or Hepplewhite chair. He said that the best works of art are finished products that preserve 'a valuable state of mind'.