If morality is so understood—as one of the achievements of human will, dictating to itself a mode of acting and being in the world—it becomes clear that no general antagonism exists between the form of consciousness, aimed at action, which is morality, and the nourishment of consciousness, which is aesthetic experience. Only when works of art are reduced to statements which propose a specific content, and when morality is identified with a particular morality (and any particular morality has its dross, those elements which are no more than a defense of limited social interests and class values)—only then can a work of art be thought to undermine morality. Indeed, only then can the full distinction between the aesthetic and the ethical be made.

There are lots of reasons to love Susan Sontag, and my favorite is the size of her project as a critic. The above isn’t from an essay on photography—it’s from 1965’s On Style, but it presages what was to come in her writings, especially in 1977’s On Photography (“Humankind lingers unregenerately in Plato’s cave, still reveling, its age-old habit, in mere images of the truth,” it begins) and 2003’s Regarding the Pain of Others. On Tuesday, the Metropolitan Museum in New York opened a photography show devoted to Sontag. (Hat tip to Modern Art Notes.) Most of the text is from her own writings, and in some cases—images by August Sander, Edward Weston, Diane Arbus, and Robert Mapplethorpe—the photographs relate directly to the text. Other groupings demonstrate her insights. It’s up through Sept 4.

The other reason to visit NY this summer, of course, is the show simply titled Dada. It’s an enormous exhibition—as the first comprehensive retrospective, perhaps the perfect tombstone?—for a movement born defiantly terminally ill. Leah Dickerman’s catalog, with its black-on-black book cover (underneath a more colorful jacket), is absolutely lucid: the best response to Dada’s disruptive, productive, and massively influential misbehaviors. The show, at MoMA, is up through Sept. 11.