Like the collector, the photographer is animated by a passion that, even when it appears to be for the present, is linked to a sense of the past.
Susan SontagRead
In most modern instances, interpretation amounts to the philistine refusal to leave the work of art alone. Real art has the capacity to make us nervous. By reducing the work of art to its content and then interpreting that, one tames the work of art. Interpretation makes art manageable, conformable.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Art should evoke emotion and remain open to interpretation, rather than being overly analyzed.
Susan Sontag's quote emphasizes that real art has the power to provoke feelings and thoughts that can be uncomfortable or challenging. By over-analyzing or trying to simplify art into its content, we risk diminishing its impact and reducing its complexity, ultimately rendering it more controllable and less profound.
Themes
ArtInterpretationEmotionsCreativityAnalyzePhilosophy
In practice
Example use cases
This quote could be used in an art critique to emphasize the importance of emotional responses over academic analysis.
More from Susan Sontag
All quotes →Science fiction films are not about science. They are about disaster, which is one of the oldest subjects of art.
Susan SontagRead
Gide and I have attained such perfect intellectual communion that I experience the appropriate labor pains for every thought he gives birth to!
Susan SontagRead
Volume depends precisely on the writer's having been able to sit in a room every day, year after year, alone.
Susan SontagRead
In NY sensuality completely turns into sexuality - no objects for the senses to respond to, no beautiful river, houses, people. Awful smells of the street, and dirt... Nothing except eating, if that, and the frenzy of the bed.
Susan SontagRead
It hurts to love. It's like giving yourself to be flayed and knowing that at any moment the other person may just walk off with your skin.
Susan SontagRead
Similar quotes
Dance music ... stirs some barbaric instinct - lulled asleep in our sober lives - you forget centuries of civilization in a second, & yield to that strange passion which sends you madly whirling round the room.
Virginia WoolfRead
If you don't live it, it won't come out your horn.
Charlie ParkerRead
You would get some fantastic syntactical phenomena. You would hear people talking in Barbados in the exact melody as a minor character in Shakespeare. Because here you have a thing that was not immured and preserved and mummified, but a voluble language, very active, very swift, very sharp.
Derek WalcottRead
With Bound, we wanted to pull at conventions, because you begin to wonder, Why do these stereotypes exist? Where do they come from? You use that as the subtext.
Lana WachowskiRead
I have no interest in ever coming out. I’m just trying to make the pictures look good; I’m not into trying to make myself look good. And besides, it’s a pretty safe bet that the reality of me would be a crushing disappointment to a couple of 15-year-old kids out there.
BanksyRead
Objects in pictures should so be arranged as by their very position to tell their own story.
Johann Wolfgang Von GoetheRead