Lot's Wife Edition 1 2017

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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.
Drawing further distinctions about what does and does not constitute genuine art within this broad criteria becomes a matter of barren metaphysics. Once we accept that art is really just any sort of creative act open to interpretation, the internal distinction between art and reality is not such an easy one to draw, and we are inevitably faced with the conclusion that even a vile act of real cruelty could be considered art. The performance-artist Marina Abramović continually emphasised this point in the 1970s in her own works, by setting herself on fire and playing with knives. It can sometimes happen that the real immoralities that intrude on an artistic work can contribute something to its aesthetic quality overall. As the fantasy author China Mieville has remarked, it is the jaw-dropping racism of H. P. Lovecraft that gave his works such a distinctive and unforgettable flavour. For Lovecraft, the very concept of racial intermixing was a revolting idea, and he did not disguise this in his works—indeed this view is foundational to some of his most suspenseful and influential works like The Shadow Over Innsmouth. Yet although we would rightly condemn someone today for harbouring even a tenth of Lovecraft’s racist views today, his short stories are oddly enlivened by his horrible ideology. The profound sense of horror and revulsion that elevates the work into something convincing and immersive just happened to be the byproduct of these personal views. So, upon reflection, if we are to be consistent, we must face up to the sometimes unpalatable consequences—morally contemptible as it may appear to us, the merit of an artwork and the morality of its origins or content have to remain conceptually distinct, even at the very extremes. If we maintain this principle in general, it must logically entail the uncomfortable and immoral as well as the morally pleasant or neutral. If an artwork is ,, article & illustration by john henry somehow immoral in its origins or its content, does it make sense to call that artwork itself inferior as a result? ,, arts/culture 36-37
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