One For The Road…
The trouble with Susan Sontag, along with many other people who like to consider themselves intellectuals, artists and benefactors of humanity today, is that they are what the French call a “poseur”.
In several of the obituaries I read about her there were absurdly pretentious statements about what she considered herself. She reminded me strongly of experimental artists who create mainly for themselves and their small coterie of followers.
According to them, art and the intellect are only for the elite who can decipher the cryptic meanings ingeniously hidden within an equally cryptic style.
Not so Isaac Bashevis Singer, a truly great artist, who said, “Many artiists like to make their subjects as complicated as possible. I prefer to make mine as simple and as clear as possible.”
Ditto the Bible, Shakespeare, the Greek tragedians and Homer, all I would submit belong in the
highest echelon of art.
As far as self-labelling is concerned, I do not remember Mother Teresa, Dr Martin Luther King, Jr, Albert Schweitzer or Jackie Robinson, to pick four people at random, as ever labelling themselves as anything but whose contribution to the betterment of humanity dwarfs anything that Mme Sontag ever did.
I have a feeling that Mme Sontag will ultimately go down in history as a very, very clever, clever woman.
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