Sontag – On culture and the New Sensibility, 1965

Having one’s sensorium challenged or stretched hurts. The new serious music hurts one’s ears, the new painting does not graciously reward one’s sight, the new films and the few interesting new prose works do not go down easily the commonest complaint about the films of Antonioni or the narratives of Beckett or Burroughs is the that they are hard to look at or to read, that they are “boring/” But the charge of boredom is really hypocritical. There is, in a sense, no such thing as boredom. Boredom is only another name for a certain species of frustration. And the new languages which the interesting art of our time speaks are frustrating to the sensibilities of most educated people.

But the purpose of art is always, ultimately, to give pleasure – though our sensibilities may take time to catch up with the forms of pleasure that art in a given time may offer. And, one can also say that, balancing the ostensible anti-hedonism of serious contemporary art, the modern sensibility is more involved with pleasure in the familiar sense than ever.