coffincarpenters3:

when sontag said that the whole idea that the way you should look at art is by interpreting the meaning under the surface rather than listening to what it says directly comes from christians trying to make the hebrew bible about christianity, and that instead of trying to interpret art we should focus on how it affects us, whether it’s beautiful and how it makes us feel. when sontag said that it doesn’t matter how deeply a photograph of violence affects you emotionally bc we’re inundated with those images by the mass media, and what matters isn’t that you have an emotional response or worse still perform an emotional response but instead that you do something about it. when sontag said that the idea that physical illness is the product of spiritual illness and that a person’s illness reflects something about their character is deeply enmeshed into how our culture thinks about illness and wellness even though we know logically that that’s not how it works. when sontag said that the gay camp sensibility is the ultimate extension of the metaphor of life as theatre.