Susan Sontag Quotes
Our task is not to find the maximum amount of content in a work of art, mush less to squeeze more content out of the work than is already there. Our task is to cut back on content so we can see the thing at all. The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art - and, by analogy, our own experience - more, rather than less, real to us.
Sontag, Susan. Against Interpretation, and Other Essays. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1966, p. 14.
Randell, a Nobel Laureate brain scientist, is also an art collector, and has studied the brain’s reaction to different kinds of art. There are some people who become so distressed with the burden of using their imagination and expecting not to have to do so, do not have a more intense experience or much of an experience at all as the reject the notion of using their imagination. They see that as the artist’s job and we say of those people that they do not care for abstract art.
Susan Sontag was an American writer, filmmaker, philosopher, teacher, and political activist. She mostly wrote essays, but also published novels; she published her first major work, the essay "Notes on 'Camp'", in 1964. Her best-known works include the critical works Against Interpretation (1966), Styles of Radical Will (1968), On Photography (1977), and Illness as Metaphor (1978), as well as the fictional works The Way We Live Now (1986), The Volcano Lover (1992), and In America (1999).
