Susan Sontag The Aesthetics Of Silence

313 Words1 Page
bulb-icon

Recommended: Annotations of a womans beauty susan sontag

Susan Sontag is one of the most incisive intellects that reflects humanity in art and the society. In the essay The Aesthetics of Silence, first published in 1969 as part of the collection Styles of Radical Will, she argues that modern art is losing its aura that abolished itself into the redundant materials, objects, language and interpretation. For her, art in the modern era plays a role similar to religion and myth in ancient time, and searching for spirituality or anti-consciousness brings the necessity of silence.

From her point of view, the spirituality in modern art means transcendence and “the completion of human consciousness” from the attempting to ease the “structural contradiction inherent in the human situation.” In that case,

Show More
Related

  • The Sistine Madonna in the Royal Gallery at Dresden, Saxony

    747 Words  | 2 Pages

    When that room is entered all voices are hushed, and all merriment silenced. The place is as holy as a church. In the centre of the canvas is the Virgin Mother with a young, almost girlish face or surpassing loveliness. In her eyes affection and wonder are blended, and the features and the figure are the most spiritual and beautiful in the world's art.

    Read More

  • Comparison of Annunciation and The Raising of Lazarus

    806 Words  | 2 Pages

    I found The Raising of Lazarus and Annunciation to be interesting pieces on their own as well as to be compared. At face value, these paintings do not appear to contain many contrasting features. However, by examining these paintings closely, one can conclude that paintings with similar themes, mediums, and time periods can still differ in countless ways. Light, medium, subject, color, space, and viewpoint are just a few of the characteristics that can be considered when analyzing Wtewael and Caliari’s works. It is imperative that observers of art take a deeper look into the different features of artwork in attempt to uncover the intentions of the artist.

    Read More

  • Essay On Elizabeth Catlett

    713 Words  | 2 Pages

    The narratives in the work speak to the racial and social inequalities in America in the nineties. This deep concern with the coloured experience and the struggle for civil rights is seen in the images and sculptures she creates. Especially of women, as she lived through a time of widespread segregation, so her work was created from the place she knew most intimately.

    Read More

  • The Sound of a Hundred Feathers: The Symbolism of Richard Hook's Painting, Adoption of the Human Race

    747 Words  | 2 Pages

    Art has always been considered the effervescent universal tool of communication. Art does not require a concrete directive . One sculpture,drawing or written creative piece, can evoke a myriad of emotions and meaning . Artistic pieces can sometimes be considered the regurgitation of the artist's internal sanctum. In Richard Hooks graphic painting,Adoption of the Human Race, the effect of the imagery,symbols ,color and emotional content projects a profound unification of a spiritual edict.

    Read More

  • Avant-Gardes: Applying Ranciere To Burger's Theory Of Avant Gardes

    2268 Words  | 5 Pages

    “…the culture industry has brought about the false elimination of the distance between art and life, and this also allows one to recognize the contradictoriness of the avant-gardiste undertaking: the result is that the Avant-garde, for all its talk of purging art of affirmation with forces of production consumption, became an accomplice in the total subsumption of Art under capitalism.”

    Read More

  • The Art of Maya Lin

    1596 Words  | 4 Pages

    ...owing us with her great works. She has led a driven and captivating career. While she has received much controversy in her time she has managed to continue creating great works. She is widely acknowledge, and so far through out her life, has made quite an impact. Her love of nature and in it’s importance is rippled through out all her work, mostly in the freedom of her later works. Her ability to maintain balance between her love for architecture and art, has helped to make her stand out in both crowds. Her sculptures will please viewers for centuries to come.

    Read More

  • Rhetorical Analysis Of Mr. Berger's Ways Of Seeing

    2775 Words  | 6 Pages

    Mr. Berger states in his essay, “The reciprocal nature of vision is more fundamental than that of a spoken dialogue. And often dialogue is an attempt to verbalize this- an attempt to explain how, either metaphorically or literally, “you see things” (120). This statement is a use of the rhetorical strategy, ethos, which is what Mr. Berger uses to gain influence and trust with the academic audience that he is intending to instill new knowledge in. This is a strong use of ethos that leads into how art is viewed so

    Read More

  • Ears Have Walls by Steven Connor

    1324 Words  | 3 Pages

    Intro: In Steven Connor’s ‘Ears Have Walls: On Hearing Art’ (2005), Connor presents us with the idea that sound art has either gone outside or has the capacity to bring the outside inside. Sound work makes us aware of the continuing emphasis upon division and partition that continues to exist even in the most radically revisable or polymorphous gallery space, because sound spreads and leaks, like odour. Unlike music, Sound Art usually does not require silence for its proper presentation.

    Read More

  • Comparing John Constable's Painting The Cornfield and William Wordsworth's Poem Tintern Abbey

    1607 Words  | 4 Pages

    It appears to me that pictures have been over-valued; held up by a blind admiration as ideal things, and almost as standards by which nature is to be judged rather than the reverse; and this false estimate has been sanctioned by the extravagant epithets that have been applied to painters, and "the divine," "the inspired," and so forth. Yet in reality, what are the most sublime productions of the pencil but selections of some of the forms of nature, and copies of a few of her evanescent effects, and this is the result, not of inspiration, but of long and patient study, under the instruction of much good sense…

    Read More

  • The Song of the Lark

    813 Words  | 2 Pages

    When first approaching this work, one feels immediately attracted to its sense of wonder and awe. The bright colors used in the sun draws a viewer in, but the astonishment, fascination, and emotion depicted in the expression on the young woman keeps them intrigued in the painting. It reaches out to those who have worked hard in their life and who look forward to a better future. Even a small event such as a song of a lark gives them hope that there will be a better tomorrow, a thought that can be seen though the countenance by this girl. Although just a collection of oils on a canvas, she is someone who reaches out to people and inspires them to appreciate the small things that, even if only for a short moment, can make the road ahead seem brighter.

    Read More

  • The Extent to Which World War I Influenced the Dada Artistic Movement

    1634 Words  | 4 Pages

    Varnedoe, Kirk. A Fine Disregard: What Makes Modern Art Modern. New York: H.N. Abrams, 1990. 152. Print.

    Read More

  • Confronting Images

    1639 Words  | 4 Pages

    In Confronting Images, Didi-Huberman considers disadvantages he sees in the academic approach of art history, and offers an alternative method for engaging art. His approach concentrates on that which is ‘visual’ long before coming to conclusive knowledge. Drawing support from the field of psycho analytics (Lacan, Freud, and Kant and Panofsky), Didi-Huberman argues that viewers connect with art through what he might describe as an instance of receptivity, as opposed to a linear, step-by-step analytical process. He underscores the perceptive mode of engaging the imagery of a painting or other work of art, which he argues comes before any rational ‘knowing’, thinking, or discerning. In other words, Didi-Huberman believes one’s mind ‘sees’ well before realizing and processing the object being looked at, let alone before understanding it. Well before the observer can gain any useful insights by scrutinizing and decoding what she sees, she is absorbed by the work of art in an irrational and unpredictable way. What Didi-Huberman is s...

    Read More

  • Beauty In Kandinsky's Definition Of Beauty

    1453 Words  | 3 Pages

    Beauty has long been an essential term in the conversation about art. In all artistic media, beauty is used as a qualification of value; a musical composition can be beautiful, as can a shot in a film or the draping of fabric in a garment. Kandinsky’s essay, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, is no exception when it comes to using beauty as a term to qualify the value of art. His essay focuses on visual art and the way that colors and forms interact with the human soul to evoke emotional responses. However, in the essay, Kandinsky utilizes beauty in multiple ways to argue numerous different and contrary points in his argument about what defines good art, leaving the reader confused as to whether beauty is a positive quality of art or a superficial

    Read More

  • The Picture Of Dorian Gray Analysis

    1179 Words  | 3 Pages

    The aesthetic movement was an artistic and literary movement that was centered on the saying “art for art’s sake” and arguing that art was not to be utilitarian or practical. The movement wanted art to exist for the sake of its beauty alone, and that it did not need to serve any political or didactic purpose. The pieces of art created by the artists in the movement did not tell stories or sermons; their art was visual, delightful, hinting at sensual desires; their poetry was pure. The proponents of the movement say that the experience of art is the most intense experience available in life and that nothing should be allowed to restrict it. The intensity of the aesthetic experience is the dominant goal in human life. If there are morally unwanted things of art, they do not really matter in contrast to this all-important experience which art can give.

    Read More

  • Susan Sontag's Innovative Essay

    955 Words  | 2 Pages

    Fifty years on from Susan Sontag’s innovative Essay “The Imagination of Disaster”, which incorporates the use of disaster films as analogies to argue that “from a psychological point of view, the imagination of disaster does not greatly differ from one period in history to another”, but on the contrary “from a political and moral point of view, it does”, Jean Baudrillard exchanges a similar set of concerns in his more recent essay ‘The mirror of terrorism’. He forms his essay on the ideas that the Western media is becoming the basis to advance how we are entering “the era of simulation and hyperreality” with “reality TV”. John C. Gilmour’s ‘Fire on the earth’, also relevant to Sontang and Stockhausen’s bald claims, contends that Anselm Kiefer, a german sculpture and painter, seeks to

    Read More

More about Susan Sontag The Aesthetics Of Silence

Open Document