#susansontag — Public Fediverse posts

New on the poddy this week. Will do a video on this at some stage, but for now, something just for the poddy people.

"Reality and Photography and Susan Sontag"

Can find it where ever you get your podcasts from. Search for "Reimagine Ewen Bell" or visit my website: https://ewenbell.com/podcast

#Photography #ReimaginePodcast #Podcast #SusanSontag

Oliver Sacks on the Three Essential Elements of Creativity

https://fed.brid.gy/r/https://www.themarginalian.org/2026/03/05/oliver-sacks-the-river-of-consciousness-the-creative-self/

Geburtstag #SusanSontag heute … „In jeder Gesellschaft gibt es einige wenige Böse, einige wenige Gute und die große Mehrheit, die mitmacht, was immer gerade geschieht.“ Ein Satz, der bis heute daran erinnert, dass #Demokratie nicht vom Mitlaufen lebt, sondern von Haltung. HappyBirthdaySusan RIP 🖖

https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/susan-sontag-a-critic-at-the-crossroads-of-culture

I haven't read enough Sontag, and that reading took place years ago, so perhaps I should return and make my own evaluation. I suspect that I will think of her being more than the "transitional' figure described in this piece from twenty years ago.

That suspicion might arise from my not sharing the author's esteem for Derrida and Lacan, an esteem which in its turn now seems to belong to a fashion now faded.

#Criticism #SusanSontag #IntellectualHistory #USHistory

"Kindness, kindness, kindness.
I want to make a New Year's prayer, not a resolution. I'm praying for courage.
​Right now, this moment. I'm not scared. The heavy weight I usually feel isn't there."
​— Susan Sontag, As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh (1972)

​#SusanSontag #Literature #NewYear #Kidness #Courage

#19agosto giornata mondiale della #fotografia

E' dedicato alla figura di #SusanSontag l'ultimo numero di #Balthazar, che vede nell'interesse per la fotografia della storica e saggista un modo per interrogare la società tra #filosofia, #letteratura, storia dell’ #arte, #scienzesociali e #comunicazione.

Il volume è disponibile in #OpenAccess qui:

🔗 https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/balthazar/issue/view/2645

#NewIssue #photography

Im Juni heißt es: cultureclubbing goes Literaturhaus #München und Unter Deck
Termin: 12.06.25

1. #Ausstellung: Susan Sontag „Everything Matters“, 20.00 – 23.00 Uhr im #Literaturhaus

2. #Feiern im Unter Deck, "ro pax presents girl scout cookies", ab 22 Uhr, Freigetränke für die ersten 50 #Studierenden

Keine Anmeldung nötig, der Eintritt ist frei!

Mehr Infos unter www.cultureclubbing.de

#kultur #SusanSontag #philosophy #party #studium #studieren #freizeit #kostenlos #gratis #tipp #event

#exhibition on #SusanSontag at the Bundeskunsthalle #Bonn until September. https://www.bundeskunsthalle.de/en/susan-sontag

𝗔𝘂𝘀𝘀𝘁𝗲𝗹𝗹𝘂𝗻𝗴 ★ 𝗘𝘀𝘀𝗮𝘆𝗶𝘀𝘁𝗶𝗻❟ 𝗦𝗰𝗵𝗿𝗶𝗳𝘁𝘀𝘁𝗲𝗹𝗹𝗲𝗿𝗶𝗻❟ 𝗞𝘂𝗹𝘁𝘂𝗿𝗯𝗲𝘀𝗲𝘀𝘀𝗲𝗻𝗲

Das Literaturhaus München zeigt eine Ausstellung zu Susan Sontag, ihrem Leben, Denken und Wirken sowie ihren Lebenstationen. ֎ mit Bildergalerie:

https://auxlitera.de/2025/05/18/susansontag-muenchen/

#münchen #literatur #susansontag #kulturtheorie #kultur #kunst #ausstellung #essayistik #kunsttheorie #literaturhaus

Eurovision Song Contest: Voyage ins Post-Ironische

Nachdenken über den ESC – denken Sie mit?
#Eurovision #ESC2025 #ZoëMë #Voyage #Ironie #Postmoderne #Camp #Kitsch #Popkultur #Pathos #ESCFinale #CélineDion #LysAssia #Naivität #Medienkritik #SusanSontag #NiklasLuhmann #Hypermedialität #SRF #SRG

Video: https://youtu.be/o2g3u_o-3OI
Podcast: https://www.buzzsprout.com/1788913/episodes/17176085
Text: https://www.matthiaszehnder.ch/wochenkommentar/eurovision-song-contest/

I've been reading #SusanSontag's book On Photography and the first chapter was very good with a kind of overall analysis of what #photography is.

It was written in the 70s, so before digital photography and before smartphones, but it's still relevant.

One notion that stuck out to me was the notion of holiday snaps. She mentions the process of capturing images of experiences more than merely experiencing them. And you can see how #SocialMedia built upon that collecting of experiences and publishing them, from exotic holidays to eating meals.

She mentions how it is a kind of work ethic: People who go on holiday have to give themselves tasks to do, to collect photos of famous landmarks. It's like people cannot truly be on holiday, that they have to turn it into a kind of work.

And again, this is like social media. There's a kind of daily checking in; we are told that to run a successful blog you have to post regularly at regular times; and the most successful social media accounts are often people who are on social media all the time.

But it also explains the use of social media for politics, that you feel like you're doing something. But I wonder if this is thinking about politics wrong; by turning it into a kind of work, a kind of office job that feeds the system rather than opposes it.

(4/11) ... l’homme sans pour autant l’être du crime"

cf #VictorHugo : "Quand vous avez vu la guillotine de près, votre avis sur la peine de mort change ".

"Toutes les études démontrent que la courbe des crimes de sang est sans rapport avec la peine de mort"

"Tu défends un homme qui a tué ou volé, parce que c’est un homme d’abord."

#livre #books #SusanSontag : Le #sida et ses métaphores

#year1981 #anthropocene #climat #climate #climatechange #climatecrisis

Schon in den 70ern warnte #SusanSontag vor der Macht der #Bilder – in Zeiten von Social Media aktueller denn je. Die Bundeskunsthalle Bonn zeigt ihre Gedankenwelt in „Susan Sontag. Sehen und gesehen werden“. Björn Göttlicher hat mit der Kuratorin gesprochen: https://www.riffreporter.de/de/wissen/susan-sontag-fotografie-kulturkritik-bundeskunsthalle-bonn

"Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick." -- Susan Sontag

Many of us will (and some already have) joined the kingdom of the sick earlier than we had anticipated.

https://time.com/7262388/fda-flu-vaccine-meeting-canceled/

#SusanSontag
#RFK
#Illness
#USAID

"Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick." -- Susan Sontag

Many of us will (and some already have) joined the kingdom of the sick earlier than we had anticipated.

https://time.com/7262388/fda-flu-vaccine-meeting-canceled/

#SusanSontag
#RFK
#Illness
#USAID

"Photographs do not explain, they acknowledge." - Susan Sontag

#photoquotes #photography #SusanSontag

Vor 75 Jahren besuchte die 16-jährige Susan Sontag den Nobelpreisträger Thomas Mann in seinem Exil in Kalifornien. Dieses Treffen prägte Sontags intellektuelles Leben und zeigt die Verbindung zwischen Literatur, Kulturkritik und öffentlichem Intellekt. #SusanSontag #ThomasMann #Kulturgeschichte #Literaturgeschichte
https://www.telepolis.de/features/Treffen-der-Galionsfiguren-Von-der-Tugend-dagegen-zu-sein-10221027.html

hal foster: “fail better. reckoning with artists and critics”

Sandro Ricaldone

HAL FOSTER
Fail Better
Reckoning with Artists and Critics
The MIT Press, 2025
(forthcoming)

“Serious art anticipates the future as much as it reflects the present,” Hal Foster remarked in a 2015 interview. “By the same token serious art history is driven by the present as much as it is informed by the past.” In Fail Better, Foster, an art critic and historian whose influential work spans disciplines and decades, brings this peripatetic perspective to contemporary art, art criticism, art history, and his own work over the past 50 years.

In these 40 texts, Foster reviews artists from Richard Hamilton and Jasper Johns to Gerhard Richter and Ed Ruscha; considers contemporaries from Louise Lawler and Cindy Sherman to Jeremy Deller and Adam Pendleton; and traces the development of criticism since the early 1960s, with essays on such influential figures as Susan Sontag and Rosalind Krauss and institutions like Artforum magazine and the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program.

Taking his title from Beckett—“try again, fail again, fail better”—Foster notes that, etymologically, an essay is always an attempt, more or less failed. Critics fail artworks, because there can never be a definitive reading; art fails its historical moment, because it cannot resolve the contradictions that prompt it. But in these failures Foster finds historical consciousness, and with it the promise of future work, future illumination. In his “reckonings” he turns his own long history of criticism to account, and succeeds in conveying shifting concepts of art and criticism, the work of key artists and critics, and the relationships between criticism, theory, history, and politics over the last six decades.

#AdamPendleton #art #arte #ArtforumMagazine #artists #CindySherman #criticism #critics #EdRuscha #GerhardRichter #HalFoster #JasperJohns #JeremyDeller #LouiseLawler #MITPress #RichardHamilton #RosalindKrauss #SusanSontag #WhitneyMuseum #WhitneyMuseumIndependentStudyProgram

#SusanSontag #OnPhotography

#Photography #books

What is important now is to recover our senses. We must learn to see
more, to hear more, to feel more. (...) Our task is to cut back content so that we can see the thing at all.
The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of
art-and, by analogy, our own experience-more, rather than less, real to us.
The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it
is what it is, rather than to show what it means.
#susansontag #essay #art
https://www.alittlesense.org/sontag-against-interpretation-summary

Wolfram Eilenberger übersetzt das Denken von Adorno, Foucault, Sontag und Feyerabend in prägnante Bilder. Das Porträt eines philosophischen Quartetts in seiner Zeit. Eine Rezension

Mit viel Mut zur Metapher gelingt Wolfram Eilenberger ein spannendes Porträt eines philosophischen Quartetts. Eine Rezension (Rezension zu Geister der Gegenwart von Wolfram Eilenberger)#Eilenberger #Philosophie #Geist #Epistemologie #Erkenntnistheorie #Logik #Metaphysik #OntologieMichelFoucault #SusanSontag #TheodorWAdorno #PaulFeyerabend #FrankfurterSchule #Strukturalismus #Poststrukturalismus #Postmoderne #Aufklärung #JürgenHabermas #MaxHorkheimer #PsychologieHirnforschung #Kultur
»Geister der Gegenwart«: Wider die Stumpfheit