The Cruelty of Art

[monk222]

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!

Comments

[miss-next.livejournal.com]

For what it's worth, I've always thought Titus Andronicus was sick, twisted and quite unnecessarily gruesome. Mind you, it's also fair to say that I'm not the only person who doesn't think it's one of his better plays; it's not the first thing that comes to mind for most people when they think of Shakespeare.

And this is encouraging, because there is a certain stream of thought that believes that art is somehow less great if it doesn't concentrate heavily on the darker side of human nature. I don't subscribe to that stream of thought. I wouldn't want to go to the other silly extreme and say that a tragedy such as Romeo and Juliet was of less value than a comedy such as Twelfth Night, because I don't believe that either, but I am a staunch defender of the lighter side of art. Indeed, sometimes it takes more skill to handle adroitly. Anyone with reasonable skill can write a tragedy that both entertains us and teaches us something about ourselves, but it takes a delicate touch to write a good thought-provoking comedy. Terry Pratchett, of course, is a master of that. He doesn't ignore or reject the darkness, but he never lets it have the last word. And I'm all for that.

[hardblue.livejournal.com]

As best as I can recall, Titus is also thought to be written mostly be a lesser hand. Though, I must say it is a personal favorite. I haven't found a Shakespeare comedy that I really liked. "Taming of the Shrew" may be the closest, but it probably isn't difficult to see why I might fancy that one. If "Merchant of Venice" counts as a comedy, I like that one, too, but that does have it's dark and even gruesome side, heh. The only way a comedy works for me is if it has rich heaping servings of sex. But I suppose it's obvious that I am a bit of a knuckle-dragger. *shrugs*