ABSTRACT
Susan Sontag’s new New Criticism, as inaugurated here, arches over the “transparent” work of art, pursuing ideas in the forms it discovers; the work itself is bracketed off in a language of untouchability. She wants to discover how to speak about what is to be known in art, and how that knowing is special to the way modern-ist art carries the burden of its own immanence. In Sontag’s aesthetic good art arises from the force of will to see the vision out as a completed idea. Artaud, screaming, out of control, a puritan of violence, and a seeker in ways that had by then become part of a movement, a troubling part, not at all what Sontag means by an aesthetic. Photography replaces the world in the most devious method of any aesthetic—through the eye. The paradoxes of the aesthetic of silence can paralyze, Sontag had written: Brother Carl’s spiritual disease glues him to the moment.
