I am not at all interested in writing about work I don’t admire. And even among what I’ve admired, by and large I’ve written only about things I felt were neglected or relatively unknown. I am not a critic, which is something else than an essayist; I thought of my essays as cultural work. They were written out of a sense of what needed to be written. I was assuming that a principal task of art was to strengthen the adversarial consciousness. And that led me to reach for relatively eccentric work. I took for granted that the liberal consensus about culture—I was and am a great admirer of Lionel Trilling—would stay in place, that the traditional canon of great books could not be threatened by work that was more transgressive or playful. But taste has become so debauched in the thirty years I’ve been writing that now simply to defend the idea of seriousness has become an adversarial act. Just to be serious or to care about things in an ardent, disinterested way is becoming incomprehensible to most people. Perhaps only those who were born in the 1930s—and maybe a few stragglers—are going to understand what it means to talk about art as opposed to art projects. Or artists as opposed to celebrities. As you see, I’m chock-full of indignation about the barbarism and relentless vacuity of this culture. How tedious always to be indignant. - Susan Sontag (via Molly Zuckerman-Hartung).
Posted on: Sat, 20 Dec 2014 17:43:42 +0000
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