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Susan Sontag’s rise from gawky swot to opinion leader and ‘art object’ is incisively charted in this exhaustive biography
“Art,” Susan Sontag declared in 1965, “is the supreme game which the will plays with itself.” Sontag, supremely wilful, played the game with herself: she began as a critic of art, but turned into what she called an “art object’” endowed with “this quality of assurance, authority” that she viewed as the barbed, bristling armature of style.
At first, what mattered was the sparky contents of Sontag’s head; by the end she was best known for the way she wore her hair – that saturnine battle helmet of dyed black, with a single stripe left white at the temple like a Frankensteinian lighting bolt of intellect. As much as Elvis with his “greasy pompadour” or Warhol in his “platinum fright wig”, she was, as Benjamin Moser points out, an adjunct of her coiffure. Her writing on photography protested against the superficiality of images, but Sontag herself had a trademarked look. Although she deplored the way that consumerism price-tagged appearances, “this ‘Susan Sontag’ thing”, as she called it, defined a personal brand. For a fee, it also lent its allure to other commodities: “In 2000,” Moser tersely notes, “she allowed herself to be photographed by Annie Leibovitz for an Absolut vodka advertisement.” Continue reading...