Lot's Wife Edition 1 2017

The Tension Between Artistic And Moral Judgements
edition one
lot’s wife
For most people, the initial answer is uncontroversial.
It’s obvious that the unsavoury details of an artist’s private and
working life, for instance, don’t interfere with our appraisal of their
works as a matter of general principle. If someone were to ask you
“did you like Crime and Punishment?”, it would be eccentric to reply “I
can’t say, I haven’t read Dostoevsky’s biography yet”. So far, so good;
this seems pretty clear.
When we refer to acts, intentions and consequences in the
real world, the term ‘good’ is often used as a moral assessment;
to art, ‘good’ is an assessment of quality. Both are normative, not
descriptive, uses of the term—they express a particular point of
view and not a matter of bare fact, but the resemblance stops there.
We respect the critical distinction between art and morality while
things go smoothly, when our artists don’t behave too badly to
warrant our attention when appraising their work, or when the
work doesn’t transgress our moral norms too far. If an artist is a
conventionally good person, for instance, we don’t consider their
works intrinsically better as a consequence; authors like Dan Brown
and Stephenie Meyer seem to be decent enough people, yet this
doesn’t affect the literary (de-)merit of their novels.
But some artists do some incredibly, extraordinarily despicable
things, and this makes the idea that ‘bad people can make good art’
more of a burden to maintain for consistency’s sake, rather than
a harmless platitude. When we learn of an artwork’s unsavoury
background history, it often becomes impossible to ‘unsee’ it
in the work, and as much as we want to pretend that art can be
disassociated from its questionable origins, few of us would be
willing to fully accept this in practice. What are we to make of a
painting of a child by the convicted sex offender Rolf Harris? How
are we to aesthetically and disinterestedly assess the artistic merit
of the portrayal of sexual violence in the film Rosemary’s Baby, when
the director Roman Polanski was to commit statutory rape not ten
years later?
This becomes an even more prickly issue when we consider
artworks that include real moral wrongs—how can we critique,
on purely aesthetic grounds, the brutal real-life slaughter of a
water buffalo in Apocalypse Now? For many, that sort of thing
could impinge on the merit of the work, as it brought about real
suffering. Perhaps we could try to make some qualifications here for
consistency’s sake. When we say that morality is distinct from art,
we may moderate this claim—perhaps when we make judgements,
morality is only distinct from art as imitation. If a person or animal
is harmed in a film in the making of an artwork, our judgements
on the work are no longer a matter of aesthetic taste. A snuff film,
however tastefully shot, is not art as it shows reality essentially as
it is.
Art is, at its core, representation; an artwork is a creation one step
removed from reality, and not the reality itself; and if what we are
observing is a real-life evil on the film screen, we can criticise it as
we would a real-life action. Therefore, when Bernardo Bertolucci
not only permitted, but included in his film the sexual assault
of actor Maria Schneider in Last Tango in Paris, we have sufficient
warrant to criticise not only Bertolucci as committing a moral
wrong, but also to condemn the quality of the film itself, as the
wrong has occurred beyond the realm of representation and into
the concrete world that permits moral critique. If the assault was
a make-believe performance, on the other hand, we would have no
warrant to do so.
Yet this doesn’t seem so intuitively correct when we apply this
‘art as mimesis’ criterion to harmless instances of reality seeping
into art. If we watch a short film of a man drinking tea, and he
is in fact drinking tea, it is dogmatic to insist that we are not
watching art, but just a movie of a man drinking tea. If anyone puts
something forward that can be observed aesthetically, it can be
regarded as art and interpreted accordingly.