Untitled - Sexey's School Moodle

transgressive artworks and their respective criticism to come to an elaboration of three
specific defenses to justify their production and value as cultural capital, and to separate
them from being so readily categorized as “trash” by the artistic, legal, and social
institutions: the Estrangement Defence, the Canonic Defence, and the Formalist Defence.
The Estrangement Defence maintains “that it is the job of art to shock us into grasping
some truth about ourselves, or about the world, or about art itself” and that “Art
undermines pieties, challenges torpid institutions, and is always fresh and disturbing.”
The Canonic Defence, an appeal to tradition, insists that “such disturbing, new artworks
are successors to familiar, established artworks and must be judged by reference to
them.” And the Formalist Defence, another version of the appeal to the Aesthetic
discourses above, claims “that it is the form of the work that matters, anxiety about its
content is misplaced; that art has its own, distinct mode of existence” (26-7).
Julius specifies that even as an emerging practice there can be no general
categorization, but that, characteristically, there are three kinds of transgressive art: an art
that violates social taboos, an art that rejects established artistic conventions, and an art
that challenges and disobeys the rules of the state. He points out that on the one hand,
one does not exclude the other, and that a work of art can belong to more than one
category at the same time (102). On the other hand, these three forms of transgressions
are not systematically perceived to be equivalent. In addition, different loci of power are
brought to bear on repressing different types of transgression. Nevertheless, these
categorizations are particularly well-suited to discuss the multilayered dimensions of
transgression as it can potentially influence cultural, social, and political discourses.
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