The conference on "The Scandal of Susan Sontag" offered an impressive array of feminist scholars. I hesitated for a moment before attributing that socio-political label, but I do not think any of them would be offended. The speakers had been Sontag's peers and significant advocates of a free path for women, even if they might have occasionally disagreed with her particular point of view. The first panel discussed her recently published, and seriously edited, journals from the years leading up to 1963 when she was thirty, had completed her education, and was just beginning to experience the success and fame she would embrace in the years to come.
One of the last questions posed by a member of the audience asked if there were any concerns that the journals revealed a side of Sontag far more uncertain than the fierce and imperious image she had presented in life. That absolute certainty had been a part of her success; she never worried about angering people with her opinions, even sometimes seemed to revel in the discomfort she caused. Were they not worried that we would begin to think of Susan Sontag differently with this new information? I was surprised by the question.
Why would we think of her now as any had thought of her then? Why should that be important?
I don't look at Manet's Olympia with the horror it caused the French when displayed in the 1865 Salon.
A quote from the Picturesque Lottery for the Salon of 1783, is quite clear in fact that we change the way we look at things: "Up to now we only expected amusement and neatness from their brushes; [women artists] show today vigor and nobility. They are finally the worthy rivals of our sex; and men, who had previously assumed their own talents to be superior in all respects, can from now on worry about real competition."
In fact, Susan Sontag was an advocate of change, which she discusses in some detail in her 1964 essay "One culture and the new sensibility". She recognized that art was "becoming increasingly the terrain of the specialist" and saw that as a part of the transformation of the function of art. Art's reference to the production of art, as well as its conscious use of other materials, produced an inter-textuality that was often only meaningful to students of art. She grants the discomfort caused by artists such as Ellsworth Kelly, Andy Warhol, and Joseph Albers. Their collaborations, improvisations were "changing the ground rules which most of us employ to recognize a work of art". For her, "art today is a new kind of instrument, an instrument for modifying consciousness and organizing new modes of sensibility". This new sensibility was of great importance to her, and a topic to which she returned in her continuing considerations of what would eventually be termed cultural studies. She participated in the new sensibility with her own works, but largely for her support of the new works being produced, glorying that the "seriousness of modern art precludes pleasure in the familiar sense". A new sense was encouraged because that is what great art has always done.
The culture changes and works of art change too. Those who have come before become a part of the canon, or not. Some get forgotten for a while, relegated to obscurity until there is a reconsideration, for example Vermeer. Others' riotousness is incorporated into the education system so that Whistler, and Susan Sontag, can be found on most college programs, in one department or another, despite their once shocking life choices. Nothing remains scandalous if kept in the spotlight long enough.
I do not consider Susan Sontag particularly shocking, though I disagree with some of her views. I don't like Dali (with the exception of Hallucinogenic Toreador) but am not disturbed by him as the conservative communists were with his The Great Masturbator. I can't stand Jeff Koons' work enough that I don't even try to understand his 'art'. Yes, I did just put that word in quotes in reference to what he does. In time, the culture views the life and work of the artist in a new light.
The next generation comes along. The world finds new wars. People change. Art changes.
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