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Well-meaning laments about violence in the media usually leave me wanting to bash someone upside the head with a tire iron. To begin with, the reformist spirit is invariably aimed down the rungs of cultural idioms, at cartoons, slasher films, pornography, rap music and video games, while the carnage and bloodletting in Shakespeare, Goya and the Bible get a pass. Low-culture violence is literal, while high-culture violence is symbolic or allegorical and subject to critical interpretation. Low-culture violence coarsens us, high-culture violence edifies us. And the lower the cultural form, or the ticket price, or — let’s just say it — the presumed education level of the typical viewer, the more depictions of violence are suspected of inducing mindless emulation in their audiences, who will soon re-enact the mayhem like morally challenged monkeys, unlike the viewers of, say, “Titus Andronicus,” about whose moral intelligence society is confident.
-- Laura Kipnis for The New York Times
Yeah, I thought it was amusing to think that the richer and more educated classes have greater moral intelligence. I imagine they have a rather more sophisticated understanding and appreciation for the subtler shades of sadism and perversion, in art and in life. In any case, I would suggest less hand-wrining about any violence in art, low or high brow. If you don't want to see it, don't go and spend your money and look at it, and that way you would also find less of the stuff being produced, not that I am expecting any of this to happen, because I take human nature to be fiercer than we would like in our our more sober and civilized reflections, which is also why I think it is good to exorcise some of this antisocial and violent energy through art and fantasy. The hard line that we need to be clear about is the one between fantasy and reality. Or so I like to think. I am more concerned about the great economic and social inequality that makes some people powerful and most others powerless, which creates conditions that give rise to very real, nasty cruelty that makes up so much of our day-to-day world.
I like dessert, too!
-- Laura Kipnis for The New York Times
Yeah, I thought it was amusing to think that the richer and more educated classes have greater moral intelligence. I imagine they have a rather more sophisticated understanding and appreciation for the subtler shades of sadism and perversion, in art and in life. In any case, I would suggest less hand-wrining about any violence in art, low or high brow. If you don't want to see it, don't go and spend your money and look at it, and that way you would also find less of the stuff being produced, not that I am expecting any of this to happen, because I take human nature to be fiercer than we would like in our our more sober and civilized reflections, which is also why I think it is good to exorcise some of this antisocial and violent energy through art and fantasy. The hard line that we need to be clear about is the one between fantasy and reality. Or so I like to think. I am more concerned about the great economic and social inequality that makes some people powerful and most others powerless, which creates conditions that give rise to very real, nasty cruelty that makes up so much of our day-to-day world.
I like dessert, too!
