Alphabetarion # Voyeur | Susan Sontag / Man Ray
Man Ray, Le Voyeur, 1965 / 74
”There is the satisfaction of being able to look at the image without flinching. There is the pleasure of flinching.”
“As long as art is understood and valued as an “absolute” activity, it will be a separate, elitist one. Elites presuppose masses.
So far as the best art defines itself by essentially “priestly” aims, it presupposes and confirms the existence of a relatively passive,
never fully initiated, voyeuristic laity which is regularly convoked to watch, listen, read, or hear — and then sent away.”
”It seems that the appetite for pictures showing bodies in pain is as keen, almost, as the desire for ones that show bodies naked.
For many centuries, in Christian art, depictions of hell offered both of these elemental satisfactions.”
Susan Sontag
