The Aesthetics of Silence

Memory - Rene Magritte (1948)

» The art of our time is noisy with appeals for silence.

A coquettish, even cheerful nihilism. One recognizes the imperative of silence, but goes on speaking anyway. Discovering that one has nothing to say, one seeks a way to say that. Beckett has announced the wish that art would renounce all further projects for disturbing matters on "the plane of the feasible," that art would retire, "weary of puny exploits. weary of pretending to be able,of being able, of doing a little better the same old thing, of going further along a dreary road." The alternative is an art consisting of "the expression that there is nothing to express, nothing with which to express, nothing from which to express, no power to express, no desire to express, together with theobligation to express." From where does this obligation derive? The very aesthetics of the death wish seems to make of that wish something incorrigibly lively.

- The Aesthetics of Silence, Susan Sontag