Susan Sontag interviewed at Salmagundi:
I would still argue that a work of art, qua work of art, cannot advocate anything. But since no work of art is in fact only a work of art, it’s often more complicated than that. In “On Style” I was trying to recast the truths expressed in Wilde’s calculatedly outrageous Preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray and Ortega y Gasset’s more sober overstatement of the same polemic against philistinism in The Dehumanization of Art—by not tacitly separating or actually opposing—as Wilde and Ortega do—aesthetic and moral response. Ten years after “On Style,” this is still the position I write from. But I have more historical flesh on my bones now. Though I continue to be as besotted an aesthete and as obsessed a moralist as I ever was, I’ve come to appreciate the limitations—and the indiscretion—of generalizing either the aesthete’s or the moralist’s view of the world without a much denser notion of historical context. Since you’ve been quoting me to myself, let me quote myself back to you. I say in that essay of 1965 that “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.” The essays I’ve been writing recently are attempts to take that point further, to make it concrete—as it applies to my own work, as well as to that of others.
more here.
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