“We live in a culture,” she said, “in which intelligence is denied relevance altogether, in a search for radical innocence, or is defended as an instrument of authority and repression. Sontag was a fervent believer in the capacity of art to delight, to inform, to transform. Sontag wrote about subjects as diverse as pornography and photography, the aesthetics of silence and the aesthetics of fascism, Bunraku puppet theater and the choreography of Balanchine, as well as portraits of such writers and intellectuals as Antonin Artaud, Walter Benjamin, Roland Barthes and Elias Canetti. Sontag died at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York City. The author of 17 books translated into 32 languages, she vaulted to public attention and critical acclaim with the 1964 publication of “Notes on Camp,” written for Partisan Review and included in “Against Interpretation,” her first collection of essays, published two years later. Hobbesian man roams the streets, quite visible, with glitter in his hair.Susan Sontag, one of America’s most influential intellectuals, internationally renowned for the passionate engagement and breadth of her critical intelligence and her ardent activism in the cause of human rights, died today of leukemia. People who are bizarre, in sexual disgrace, emotionally vacant are seen daily on the newsstands, on TV, in the subways.

The freakish is no longer a private zone, difficult of access.

What is safe no long monopolizes public imagery. These contrasts, now, seem almost quaint. Arbus's work expressed her turn against what was public (as she experienced it), conventional, safe, reassuring-and boring-in favor of what was private, hidden, ugly, dangerous, and fascinating. Although much of Arbus's material is the same as that depicted in, say, Warhol's Chelsea Girls (1966).For Arbus, both freaks and Middle America were equally exotic: a boy marching in a pro-war parade and a Levittown housewife were as alien as a dwarf or a transvestite lower-middle-class suburbia was as remote as Times Square, lunatic asylums, and gay bars. Her Dantesque vision of the city (and the suburbs) has no reserves of irony. Compared with Warhol, Arbus seems strikingly vulnerable, innocent-and certainly more pessimistic. To someone raised as a Catholic, like Warhol (and virtually everyone in his gang), a fascination with evil comes much more genuinely than it does to someone from a Jewish background. It is unlikey that Warhol, who comes from a working-class family, ever felt any ambivalence toward success which afflicted the children of the Jewish upper middle classes in the 1960s. Arbus had neither Warhol's narcissism and genius for publicity nor the self-protective blandness with which he insulates himself from the freaky nor his sentimentality. “Most of Arbus's work lies within the Warhol aesthetic, that is, defines itself in relation to the twin poles of boringness and freakishness but it doesn't have the Warhol style.

Susan sontag