Art & Creativity Quote by Susan Sontag

Sontag lands a provocation that still irritates the right people: “style” isn’t the decorative afterparty of meaning, it’s the thing itself. By yoking style to art, then flattening art into “stylized, dehumanized representation,” she cuts against the comforting myth that great work is simply raw feeling transcribed. The word “dehumanized” is the needle. It doesn’t mean art is cruel or anti-human; it means art becomes art by refusing to be a person. A painting, a sentence, a film shot can’t remain a pulse or a confession. It has to be made into an object with rules, limits, and an angle on reality.

The subtext is an argument with two familiar pieties: that content is morally superior to form, and that authenticity equals virtue. Sontag treats both as sentimental. “Various modes” suggests there’s no single pure route to truth; there are only crafted distortions, each with its own honesty. Style, then, isn’t a mask hiding the real self. It’s the technique that produces intelligibility in the first place, the deliberate distance that lets experience be seen rather than merely endured.

Context matters: Sontag’s career is a long campaign against mushy interpretation and for the dignity of surface, sensation, and form (think “Against Interpretation”). This line belongs to that modernist lineage that mistrusts “human interest” as a default aesthetic. It’s a reminder that representation is always an editing of the human, and the edit is where the art lives.