Art, for her, had been a means of increasing sensation: “to see more, to hear more, to feel more.” Behind her attack on Arbus was a fear that this art would make her feel less, glossing over reality, aestheticizing it, reifying it: “To the painful nightmarish reality out there,” Sontag wrote, “Arbus applied such adjectives as ‘terrific,’ ‘interesting,’ ‘incredible,’ ‘fantastic,’ ‘sensational’—the childlike wonder of the pop mentality.”
