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[t]he Visibility Of Styles Is Itself A Product Of Historical Consciousness. ... The Very Notion Of "style" Needs To Be Approached Historically. Awareness Of Style As A Problematic And Isolable Element In A Work Of Art Has Emerged In The Audience For Art Only At Certain Historical Moments - As A Front Behind Which Other Issues, Ultimately Ethical And Political, Are Being Debated.

-Susan Sontag

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[t]he Visibility Of Styles

Susan Sontag

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[t]he Visibility Of Styles Is Itself A Product Of Historical Consciousness. ... The Very Notion Of "style" Needs To Be Approached Historically. Awareness Of Style As A Problematic And Isolable Element In A Work Of Art Has Emerged In The Audience For Art Only At Certain Historical Moments - As A Front Behind Which Other Issues, Ultimately Ethical And Political, Are Being Debated.

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The Only Story That Seems Worth Writing Is A Cry, A Shot, A Scream. A Story Should Break The Reader's Heart.

That's What A Community Is: Taking For Granted Certain Assumptions, Not Having To Start From Zero Every Time. This Is No Longer True.

Do Stuff. Be Clenched, Curious. Not Waiting For Inspiration's Shove Or Society's Kiss On Your Forehead.

Kindness, Kindness, Kindness. I Want To Make A New Year's Prayer, Not A Resolution. I'm Praying For Courage.

Ours Is A Culture Based On Excess, On Overproduction; The Result Is A Steady Loss Of Sharpness In Our Sensory Experience. All The Conditions Of Modern Life - Its Material Plenitude, Its Sheer Crowdedness - Conjoin To Dull Our Sensory Faculties

Nature In America Has Always Been Suspect, On The Defensive, Cannibalized By Progress. In America, Every Specimen Becomes A Relic.

Desire Has No History.

We Live In A Culture In Which Intelligence Is Denied Relevance Altogether, In A Search For Radical Innocence, Or Is Defended As An Instrument Of Authority And Repression. In My View, The Only Intelligence Worth Defending Is Critical, Dialectical, Skeptical, Desimplifying.

The "happening" Operates By Creating An Asymmetrical Network Of Surprises, Without Climax Or Consummation, This Is The Alogism Of Dreams Rather Than The Logic Of Most Art.

Aids Obliges People To Think Of Sex As Having, Possibly, The Direst Consequences: Suicide. Or Murder.

There Is A Terrible, Mean American Resentment Toward A Writer Who Tries To Do Many Things.

... Liberal Intellectualstend To Have A Classical Theory Of Politics, In Which The State Has A Monopoly Of Power; Hoping Thatthose In Positions Of Authority May Prove To Be Enlightened Men, Wielding Power Justly, They Are Natural, If Cautious, Allies Of The "establishment.

Societies Need To Have One Illness Which Becomes Identified With Evil, And Attaches Blame To Its Victims.

Photographs Are A Way Of Imprisoning Reality, Understood As Recalcitrant, Inaccessible; Of Making It Stand Still. Or They Enlarge A Reality That Is Felt To Be Shrunk, Hollowed Out, Perishable, Remote. One Can't Possess Reality, One Can Possess (and Be Possessed By) Images.

The Becoming Of Man Is The History Of The Exhaustion Of His Possibilities.

The White Race Is The Cancer Of Human History.

In ‘life,’ I Don’t Want To Be Reduced To My Work. In ‘work,’ I Don’t Want To Be Reduced To My Life.

One Set Of Messages Of The Society We Live In Is: Consume. Grow. Do What You Want. Amuse Yourselves.

...what I Write Is Smarter Than I Am. Because I Can Rewrite It.

Interpretation Is The Revenge Of The Intellect Upon Art. Even More. It Is The Revenge Of The Intellect Upon The World. To Interpret Is To Impoverish, To Deplete The World -- In Order To Set Up A Shadow World Of ''meanings.''

I Want To Live As Long As Possible, Just To See How Stupid It Gets.

The Easiest Thing In The World For Me Is To Pay Attention.

The Feminist Movement Has Been Important To Me Because It's Made Me Feel Less Odd And Also Because It Has Made Me Understand Some Of The Pressures On Women Which I Was Lucky Enough To Have Escaped, Perhaps Because Of My Eccentricity Or The Oddness Of My Upbringing.

In Good Films, There Is Always A Directness That Entirely Frees Us From The Itch To Interpret.

Victims Suggest Innocence. And Innocence, By The Inexorable Logic That Governs All Relational Terms, Suggests Guilt.

Perversity Is The Muse Of Modern Literature.

Tamed As It May Be, Sexuality Remains One Of The Demonic Forces In Human Consciousness - Pushing Us At Intervals Close To Taboo And Dangerous Desires, Which Range From The Impulse To Commit Sudden Arbitrary Violence Upon Another Person To The Voluptuous Yearning For The Extinction Of One's Consciousness, For Death Itself. Even On The Level Of Simple Physical Sensation And Mood, Making Love Surely Resembles Having An Epileptic Fit At Least As Much As, If Not More Than, It Does Eating A Meal Or Conversing With Someone.

Courage Is Morally Neutral.

Self-censorship, The Most Important And Most Successful Form Of Censorship, Is Rampant. Debate Is Identified With Dissent, Which Is In Turn Identified With Disloyalty. There Is A Widespread Feeling That, In This New, Open-ended Emergency, We May Not Be Able To 'afford' Our Traditional Freedoms.

What Seems Distinctively Modern As A Unit Of Thought, Of Art, Of Discourse Is The Fragment; And The Quotation Is One Kind Of Fragment.

The Freakish Is No Longer A Private Zone, Difficult Of Access. People Who Are Bizarre, In Sexual Disgrace, Emotionally Violent Areseen Daily On The Newsstands, On Tv, In The Subways. Hobbesian Man Roams The Streets, Quite Visible, With Glitter In His Hair.

The Solution To A Problem - A Story That You Are Unable To Finish - Is The Problem. It Isn't As If The Problem Is One Thing And The Solution Something Else. The Problem, Properly Understood = The Solution. Instead Of Trying To Hide Or Efface What Limits The Story, Capitalize On That Very Limitation. State It, Rail Against It.

...to Photograph Is To Frame, And To Frame Is To Exclude.

Al Forms Of Consensus About ''great'' Books And ''perennial'' Problems, Once Stabilized, Tend To Deteriorate Eventually Into Something Philistine. The Real Life Of The Mind Is Always At The Frontiers Of ''what Is Already Known.'' Those Great Books Don't Only Need Custodians And Transmitters. To Stay Alive, They Also Need Adversaries. The Most Interesting Ideas Are Heresies.

Photographs Are A Way Of Imprisoning Reality, Understood As Recalcitrant, Inaccessible; Of Making It Stand Still. One Can't Possess Reality, One Can Possess (and Be Possessed By) Images — As, According To Proust, Most Ambitious Of Voluntary Prisoners, One Can't Possess The Present But One Can Possessthe Past.

If Within The Last Century Art Conceived As An Autonomous Activity Has Come To Be Invested With An Unprecedented Stature - The Nearest Thing To A Sacramental Human Activity Acknowledged By Secular Society - It Is Because One Of The Tasks Art Has Assumed Is Making Forays Into And Taking Up Positions On The Frontiers Of Consciousness (often Very Dangerous To The Artist As A Person) And Reporting Back What's There.

Secular Society

10 Percent Of Any Population Is Cruel, No Matter What, And 10 Percent Is Merciful, No Matter What, And The Remaining 80 Percent Can Be Moved In Either Direction.

Art Is A Form Of Consciousness.

It's Hard Not To Be Afraid. Be Less Afraid.

Funny Graduation

The Idea Of Content In Art Is Today Merely A Hindrance, A Nuisance, A Subtle Or Not So Subtle Philistinism.

Being In Love Means Being Willing To Ruin Yourself For The Other Person.

Like The Effects Of Industrial Pollution And The New System Of Global Financial Markets, The Aids Crisis Is Evidence Of A World In Which Nothing Important Is Regional, Local, Limited; In Which Everything That Can Circulate Does, And Every Problem Is, Or Is Destined To Become, Worldwide.

I'm Not Interested In Giving Aid And Comfort To The Neo-conservatives.

The Only Interesting Ideas Are Heresies

Camp Is Art That Proposes Itself Seriously, But Cannot Be Taken Altogether Seriously Because It Is 'too Much.

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.

For Those Who Live Neither With Religious Consolations About Death Nor With A Sense Of Death (or Of Anything Else) As Natural, Death Is The Obscene Mystery, The Ultimate Affront, The Thing That Cannot Be Controlled. It Can Only Be Denied.

In The Valley Of Sorrow, Spread Your Wings.

The Point Is To Get A Good Rhythm, To Make It Mindless, Almost As A Daydream. To Walk Like Breathing. To Make It What The Body Wants, What The Air Wants, What Time Wants.

The Creative Phase Of An Idea Coincides With The Period During Which It Insists, Cantankerously, On Its Boundaries, On What Makes It Different; But An Idea Becomes False And Impotent When It Seeks Reconciliation, At Cut-rate Prices, With Other Ideas.

So Successful Has Been The Camera's Role In Beautifying The World That Photographs, Rather Than The World, Have Become The Standard Of The Beautiful.

Everything Was Simple, Physical, Painful, Exalting. The World Consisted Of The Four Elements - Land And Water, Firepower And Distancing Air.

Illness Is The Night-side Of Life, A More Onerous Citizenship. Everyone Who Is Born Holds Dual Citizenship, In The Kingdom Of The Well And In The Kingdom Of The Sick.

The Best Emotions To Write Out Of Are Anger And Fear Or Dread. The Least Energizing Emotion To Write Out Of Is Admiration. It Is Very Difficult To Write Out Of Because The Basic Feeling That Goes With Admiration Is A Passive Contemplative Mood.

The Decline Of Education In North America And I Suppose In Western Europe Makes It Harder To Have A Common Body Of References.

Everyone Who Lives In An Industrialized Society Is Obliged Gradually To Give Up The Past, But In Certain Countries, Such As The United States And Japan, The Break With The Past Has Been Particularly Traumatic.

Making Social Comment Is An Artificial Place For An Artist To Start From. If An Artist Is Touched By Some Social Condition, What The Artist Creates Will Reflect That, But You Can't Force It.

You Can Always Be Quoted.

Images Have Been Reproached For Being A Way Of Watching Suffering At A Distance, As If There Were Some Other Way Of Watching.

Writing Is A Little Door. Some Fantasies, Like Big Pieces Of Furniture, Won’t Come Through.

Most Men Experience Getting Older With Regret, Apprehension. But Most Women Experience It Even More Painfully: With Shame. Aging Is A Man's Destiny, Something That Must Happen Because He Is A Human Being. For A Woman, Aging Is Not Only Her Destiny . . . It Is Also Her Vulnerability.

We Fret About Words, We Writers. Words Mean. Words Point. They Are Arrows. Arrows Stuck In The Rough Hide Of Reality. And The More Portentous, More General The Word, The More They Can Also Resemble Rooms Or Tunnels. They Can Expand, Or Cave In. They Can Come To Be Filled With A Bad Smell. They Will Often Remind Us Of Other Rooms, Where We'd Rather Dwell Or Where We Think We Are Already Living. They Can Be Spaces We Lose The Art Or The Wisdom Of Inhabiting. And Eventually Those Volumes Of Mental Intention We No Longer Know How To Inhabit Will Be Abandoned, Boarded Up, Closed Down.

A Thing Is A Thing, Not What Is Said Of That Thing.

A Good Book Is An Education Of The Heart.

His View Of Time, And Of Change, Has Become That Of Most Elderly People: He Hates Change, Since For Him - For His Body - Any Change Is For The Worse. And If There Is To Be Change, Then He Wants It To Happen Quickly, So It Does Not Use Up Too Much Of The Time Remaining To Him.

In Contrast To The Written Account-which, Depending On Its Complexity Of Thought, Reference, And Vocabulary, Is Pitched At A Larger Or Smaller Readership-a Photograph Has Only One Language And Is Destined Potentially For All.

Camp Taste Turns Its Back On The Good-bad Axis Of Ordinary Aesthetic Judgment. Camp Doesn't Reverse Things. It Doesn't Argue That The Good Is Bad, Or The Bad Is Good. What It Does Is To Offer For Art, And Life, A Different - A Supplementary - Set Of Standards.

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Shouting Has Never Made Me Understand Anything.

To Patronize The Faculty Of Taste Is To Patronize Oneself. For Taste Governs Every Free - As Opposed To Rote - Human Response.

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'camp' Is A Vision Of The World In Terms Of Style - But A Particular Style. It Is The Love Of The Exaggerated.

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Writing Is A Mysterious Activity.

Sanity Is A Cozy Lie.

What I Really Wanted Was Every Kind Of Life, And The Writer’s Life Seemed The Most Inclusive.

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The Only Interesting Answers Are Those That Destroy The Questions.

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The Writers Or Artists I Write About Are Not Necessarily Those I Care Most About (shakespeare Is Still My Favourite Writer) But Those Whose Work I Feel Has Been Neglected.

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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.

The Work Of Art Itself Is . . . A Vibrant, Magical, And Exemplary Object Which Returns Us To The World In Some Way More Open And Enriched.

It Seems Positively Unnatural To Travel Without Taking A Camera Along... The Very Activity Of Taking Pictures Is Soothing And Assuages General Feelings Of Disorientation That Are Likely To Be Exacerbated By Travel.

All Photographs Aspire To The Condition Of Being Memorable - That Is, Unforgettable.

Everything Has Changed And Nothing Is Changed.

Things Have Changed

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Books Are Funny Little Portable Pieces Of Thought.

She Felt Herself Needing More And More Sleep. When She Awoke In The Morning, She Thought Of When She Might Lie Down Again - And When She Would Sleep. She Started Going To The Movies.

I Don't Write Because There's An Audience. I Write Because There Is Literature.

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There Are Some Elements In Life - Above All, Sexual Pleasure - About Which It Isn't Necessary To Have A Position.

I Haven't Been Everywhere, But It's On My List.

Translation Is The Circulatory System Of The World's Literatures

Circulatory System

Cameras Began Duplicating The World At That Moment When The Human Landscape Started To Undergo A Vertiginous Rate Of Change: While An Untold Number Of Forms Of Biological And Social Life Are Being Destroyed In A Brief Span Of Time, A Device Is Available To Record What Is Disappearing.

What Pornography Is Really About, Ultimately, Isn't Sex But Death.

Everything Should Be Understood, And Anything Can Be Transformed - That Is The Modern View.

A Lot Of What I've Written In Criticism Of My Lust For Virtue - My Discovery That I've Committed Idolatry, Making Of The Good An Idol - Is Open To The Charge Of Being Still Caught Within The Dialectic Of Idolatry. I've Made A Moral Criticism Of My Moral Consciousness. Meta-idolatry.

A Personality Is Our Way Of Being For Others. We Hope That Others Will Meet Us Half Way Or More, Gratify Our Needs, Be Our Audience, Soothe Our Fears.

Nothing Is Mysterious, No Human Relation. Except Love.

Though Collecting Quotations Could Be Considered As Merely An Ironic Mimetism

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Total Experiences, Of Which There Are Many Kinds, Tend Again And Again To Be Apprehended Only As Revivals Or Translations Of The Religious Imagination. To Try To Make A Fresh Way Of Talking At The Most Serious, Ardent, And Enthusiastic Level, Heading Off The Religious Encapsulation, Is One Of The Primary Intellectual Tasks Of Future Thought.

It's Beginnings That Are Hard. I Always Begin With A Great Sense Of Dread And Trepidation. Nietzsche Says That The Decision To Start Writing Is Like Leaping Into A Cold Lake.

Intelligence Is Really A Kind Of Taste: Taste In Ideas.

The Camera Makes Everyone A Tourist In Other People's Reality, And Eventually In One's Own.

Using A Camera Appeases The Anxiety Which The Work-driven Feel About Not Working When They Are On Vacation And Supposed To Be Having Fun. They Have Something To Do That Is Like A Friendly Imitation Of Work: They Can Take Pictures.

Part Of The Puzzle, Surely, Lies In The Disconnect Between Official Rhetoric And Lived Realities. Americans Are Constantly Extolling “traditions”; Litanies To Family Values Are At The Center Of Every Politician’s Discourse. And Yet The Culture Of America Is Extremely Corrosive Of Family Life, Indeed Of All Traditions Except Those Redefined As “identities” That Fit In The Larger Patterns Of Distinctiveness, Cooperation, And Openness To Innovation.

One Man Thinks Before He Acts. Another Man Thinks After He Acts. Each Is Of The Opinon That The Other Thinks Too Much.

Fear Of Sexuality Is The New, Disease-sponsored Register Of The Universe Of Fear In Which Everyone Now Lives. Cancerphobia Taught Us The Fear Of A Polluting Environment; Now We Have The Fear Of Polluting People That Aids Anxiety Inevitably Communicates. Fear Of The Communion Cup, Fear Of Surgery: Fear Of Contaminated Blood, Whether Christ's Blood Or Your Neighbor's.

Art Is Not Only About Something; It Is Something. A Work Of Art Is A Thing In The World, Not Just A Text Or Commentary On The World.

You Have To Sink Way Down To A Level Of Hopelessness And Desperation To Find The Book That You Can Write.

A Photograph Passes For Incontrovertible Proof That A Given Thing Happened. The Picture May Distort; But There Is Always A Presumption That Something Exists, Or Did Exist, Which Is Like What’s In The Picture

One Can Never Ask Anyone To Change A Feeling.

By Furnishing This Already Crowded World With A Duplicate One Of Images, Photography Makes Us Feel That The World Is More Available Than It Really Is.

Strictly Speaking, It Is Doubtful That A Photograph Can Help Us Understand Anything.

I Don't Consider Devotion To The Past A Form Of Snobbery. Just One Of The More Disastrous Forms Of Unrequited Love.

Unrequited Love

People Robbed Of Their Past Seem To Make The Most Fervent Picture Takers, At Home And Abroad.

Passion Paralyzes Good Taste.

My Emotional Life: Dialectic Between Craving For Privacy And Need To Submerge Myself In A Passionate Relationship To Another.

Any Important Disease Whose Causality Is Murky, And For Which Treatment Is Ineffectual, Tends To Be Awash In Significance.

Reality Has Come To Seem More And More Like What We Are Shown By Cameras.

I'm Only Interested In People Engaged In A Project Of Self-transformation.

I Discovered That I Am Tired Of Being A Person. Not Just Tired Of Being The Person I Was, But Any Person At All

As One Passion Begins To Fail It Is Necessary To Form Another, For The Whole Art Of Going Through Life Tolerably Is To Keep Oneself Eager About Anything.

What Interests Me Is To Understand The Nature Of The Modern.

Our Very Sense Of Situation Is Now Articulated By The Camera's Interventions. The Omnipresence Of Cameras Persuasively Suggests That Time Consists Of Interesting Events, Events Worth Photographing. This, In Turn, Makes It Easy To Feel That Any Event, Once Underway, And Whatever Its Moral Character, Should Be Allowed To Complete Itself - So That Something Else Can Be Brought Into The World, The Photograph.

But When We Are Nostalgic, We Take Pictures

I Perceive Value, I Confer Value, I Create Value, I Even Create — Or Guarantee — Existence. Hence, My Compulsion To Make “lists.” The Things (beethoven’s Music, Movies, Business Firms) Won’t Exist Unless I Signify My Interest In Them By At Least Noting Down Their Names. Nothing Exists Unless I Maintain It (by My Interest, Or My Potential Interest). This Is An Ultimate, Mostly Subliminal Anxiety. Hence, I Must Remain Always, Both In Principle + Actively, Interested In Everything. Taking All Of Knowledge As My Province.

I Write - And Talk - In Order To Find Out What I Think.

One Cannot Use The Life To Interpret The Work. But One Can Use The Work To Interpret The Life.

The Fact That Illness Is Associated With The Poor --who Are, From The Perspective Of The Privileged, Aliens In One's Midst --reinforces The Association Of Illness With The Foreign With An Exotic, Often Primitive Place.

Paintings Invariably Sum Up; Photographs Usually Do Not. Photographic Images Are Pieces Of Evidence In An Ongoing Biography Or History. And One Photograph, Unlike One Painting, Implies That There Will Be Others.

And What Do I Mean By The Word 'perfection'? That I Shall Not Try To Explain But Only Say, 'perfection Makes Me Laugh.' Not Cynically, I Hasten To Add, 'with Joy.

You Can Include Essay Elements In Fiction; This Is A Very Nineteenth Century Practice.

Photographs Furnish Evidence. Something We Hear About, But Doubt, Seems Proven When We're Shown A Photograph Of It.

Anthropology Has Always Struggled With An Intense, Fascinated Repulsion Towards Its Subject.... [the Anthropologist] Submits Himself To The Exotic To Confirm His Own Inner Alienation As An Urban Intellectual.

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.

Worst Case Scenario

People Don't Become Inured To What They Are Shown - If That's The Right Way To Describe What Happens - Because Of The Quantity Of Images Dumped On Them. It Is Passivity That Dulls Feeling. The States Described As Apathy, Moral Or Emotional Anesthesia, Are Full Of Feelings; The Feelings Are Rage And Frustration.

Art Today Is A New Kind Of Instrument, An Instrument For Modifying Consciousness And Organizing New Modes Of Sensibility . . . . Artists Have Had To Become Self-conscious Aestheticians: Continually Challenging Their Means, Their Materials And Methods.

Whatever Doesn't Kill You Leaves Scars.

Along With People Who Pretty Themselves For The Camera, The Unattractive And The Disaffected Have Been Assigned Their Beauty.

...to Be A Poet, Requires A Mythology Of The Self. The Self Described Is The Poet Self, To Which The Daily Self (and Others) Are Often Ruthlessly Sacrificed. The Poet Self Is The Real Self, The Other One Is The Carrier; And When The Poet Self Dies, The Person Dies.

Painters And Sculptors Under The Nazis Often Depicted The Nude, But They Were Forbidden To Show Any Bodily Imperfections. Their Nudes Look Like Pictures In Physique Magazines: Pinups Which Are Both Sanctimoniously Asexual And (in A Technical Sense) Pornographic, For They Have The Perfection Of A Fantasy.

It Is Not Altogether Wrong To Say That There Is No Such Thing As A Bad Photograph - Only Less Interesting, Less Relevant, Less Mysterious Ones.

Most People In This Society Who Aren't Actively Mad Are, At Best, Reformed Or Potential Lunatics.

Surrealism Can Only Deliver A Reactionary Judgment; Can Make Out Of History Only An Accumulation Of Oddities, A Joke, A Death Trip.

There Is A Great Deal That Either Has To Be Given Up Or Be Taken Away From You If You Are Going To Succeed In Writing A Body Of Work.

Anything In History Or Nature That Can Be Described As Changing Steadily Can Be Seen As Heading Toward Catastrophe.

Creativity Needs To Be Taken Care Of. It's Like A Big Baby That Needs To Be Nourished.

In The Greatest Art, One Is Always Aware Of Things That Cannot Be Said. . .of The Contradiction Between Expression And The Presence Of The Inexpressible. Stylistic Devices Are Also Techniques Of Avoidance. The Most Potent Elements Of A Work Of Art Are, Often, Its Silences.

Compassion Is An Unstable Emotion. It Needs To Be Translated Into Action, Or It Withers. The Question Is What To Do With The Feelings That Have Been Aroused, The Knowledge That Has Been Communicated. People Don't Become Inured To What They Are Shown — If That's The Right Way To Describe What Happens — Because Of The Quantity Of Images Dumped On Them. It Is Passivity That Dulls Feeling.

The Most Refined Form Of Sexual Attractiveness - As Well As The Most Refined Form Of Sexual Pleasure - Consists In Going Against The Grain Of One's Sex.

I Do Not Think White America Is Committed To Granting Equality To The American Negro... This Is A Passionately Racist Country; It Will Continue To Be So In The Foreseeable Future.

[t]he Visibility Of Styles Is Itself A Product Of Historical Consciousness. ... The Very Notion Of "style" Needs To Be Approached Historically. Awareness Of Style As A Problematic And Isolable Element In A Work Of Art Has Emerged In The Audience For Art Only At Certain Historical Moments - As A Front Behind Which Other Issues, Ultimately Ethical And Political, Are Being Debated.

It Is The Nature Of Aphoristic Thinking To Be Always In A State Of Concluding; A Bid To Have The Final Word Is Inherent In All Powerful Phrase-making.

The Quote Is Always Fascinating Because It Changes Out Of Context, Becomes Different And Sometimes More Mysterious. It Has A Directness And Assertiveness It May Not Have Had In The Original. I Think The Quality Of Inaccessibility, The Mystery, Is Important - That Whatever Matters Can't Be Taken In On Just One Reading Or One Seeing. This Is Certainly A Quality Of The Little Of Art That Lasts.

Although There Is A Sense In Which The Camera Does Indeed Capture Reality, Not Just Interpret It, Photographs Are As Much An Interpretation Of The World As Paintings And Drawings Are

It Is Not The Position, But The Disposition.

My Ignorance Is Not Charming.

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.

The Western Memory Museum Is Now Mostly A Visual One.

A Way Of Certifying Experience, Taking Photographs Is Also A Way Of Refusing It - By Limiting Experience To A Search For The Photogenic, By Converting Experience Into An Image, A Souvenir. Travel Becomes A Strategy For Accumulating Photographs.

Photographs Shock Insofar As They Show Something Novel.

Today Everything Exists To End In A Photograph.

I Believe That Courage Is Morally Neutral. I Can Well Imagine Wicked People Being Brave And Good People Being Timid Or Afraid. I Don't Consider It A Moral Virtue.

Communism Is Fascism With A Human Face.

I Love To Read The Way People Love To Watch Television.

Images Are More Real Than Anyone Could Have Supposed.

The Romantic Treatment Of Death Asserts That People Were Made Singular, Made More Interesting, By Their Illnesses.

Books Are Not Only The Arbitrary Sum Of Our Dreams, And Our Memory. They Also Give Us The Model Of Self-transcende Nce.

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.

I Must Remain Always, Both In Principle + Actively, Interested In Everything. Taking All Of Knowledge As My Province.

Knowing A Great Deal About What Is In The World Art, Catastrophe, The Beauties Of Nature Through Photographic Images, People Are Frequently Disappointed, Surprised, Unmoved When The See The Real Thing. For Photographic Images Tend To Subtract Feeling From Something We Experience At First Hand And The Feelings They Do Arouse Are, Largely, Not Those We Have In Real Life. Often Something Disturbs Us More In Photographed Form Than It Does When We Actually Experience It.

The Whole Point Of Camp Is To Dethrone The Serious. Camp Is Playful, Anti-serious. More Precisely, Camp Involves A New, More Complex Relation To "the Serious." One Can Be Serious About The Frivolous, Frivolous About The Serious.

Dissimulation, Secretiveness, Appear A Necessity To The Melancholic. He Has Complex, Often Veiled Relations With Others. These Feelings Of Superiority, Of Inadequacy, Of Baffled Feeling, Of Not Being Able To Get What One Wants, Or Even Name It Properly (or Consistently) To Oneself — These Can Be, It Is Felt They Ought To Be, Masked By Friendliness, Or The Most Scrupulous Manipulation.

American Energy. . . Is The Energy Of Violence, Of Free-floating Resentment And Anxiety Unleashed By Chronic Cultural Dislocations Which Must Be, For The Most Part, Ferociously Sublimated. This Energy Has Mainly Been Sublimated Into Crude Materialism

We Live In A World Of Copies And We're Fascinated When We Encounter The Originals (in A Museum, For Instance).

Photography - The Supreme Form Of Travel, Of Tourism - Is The Principal Modern Means For Enlarging The World. As A Branch Of Art, Photography's Enterprise Of World Enlargement Tends To Specialize In The Subjects Felt To Be Challenging, Transgressive. A Photograph May Be Telling Us: This Too Exists. And That. And That. (and It Is All 'human.') But What Are We To Do With This Knowledge - If Indeed It Is Knowledge, About, Say, The Self, About Abnormality, About Ostracized Or Clandestine Worlds?

One Task Of Literature Is To Formulate Questions And Construct Counterstatements To The Reigning Pieties. And Even When Art Is Not Oppositional, The Arts Gravitate Toward Contrariness. Literature Is Dialogue: Responsiveness. Literature Might Be Described As The History Of Human Responsiveness To What Is Alive And What Is Moribund As Cultures Evolve And Interact With One Another.

What Makes Me Feel Strong? Being In Love And Work. I Must Work.

Instead Of Just Recording Reality, Photographs Have Become The Norm For The Way Things Appear To Us, Thereby Changing The Very Idea Of Reality And Of Realism.

A Good Book Is An Education Of The Heart. It Enlarges Your Sense Of Human Possibility What Human Nature Is Of What Happens In The World. It's A Creator Of Inwardness.

To Take A Photograph Is To Participate In Another Person's Mortality, Vulnerability, Mutability. Precisely By Slicing Out This Moment And Freezing It, All Photographs Testify To Time's Relentless Melt.

Try Not To Live In A Linguistic Slum.

Talking Like Touching. Writing Like Punching Somebody.

Time Exists In Order That Everything Doesn’t Happen All At Once…and Space Exists So That It Doesn’t All Happen To You.

Thinking, Writing Are Ultimately Questions Of Stamina.

There Is An Aggression Implicit In Every Use Of The Camera.

Tragedy Is A Vision Of Nihilism, A Heroic Or Ennobling Vision Of Nihilism.

While A Painting, Even One That Meets Photographic Standards Of Resemblance, Is Never More Than The Stating Of An Interpretation, A Photograph Is Never Less Than The Registering Of An Emanation (light Waves Reflected By Objects) — A Material Vestige Of Its Subject In A Way That No Painting Can Be.

Despite The Illusion Of Giving Understanding, What Seeing Through Photographs Really Invites Is An Acquisitive Relation To The World That Nourishes Aesthetic Awareness And Promotes Emotional Detachment.

The Most Potent Elements In A Work Of Art Are, Often, Its Silences.

All Great Art Contains At Its Center Contemplation, A Dynamic Contemplation.

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Jerry Bruckheimer

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