An interesting article in today's NYT contains comments by leading critics about the diminishing role of shock in the arts, or the difficulty of doing anything as art that is also shocking.
Almost nothing seems to shock us anymore in the arts because the last boundary is the imaginative separation of life and art, regardless of efforts to breach it. The most vulgar, violent, bizarre imagery in the arts is always, well, art, and thus safely distinguished from real life. We can calmly watch a cimema rape, murder, and mayhem, knowing that it occurred on the screen, in imagination, and not in real life. We can enjoy looking at a Peter Saul painting of the same -- so beautifully painted -- and walk away feeling good. So argue the people quoted in the article. But the ancient Romans went one better. When they put on a show of rape, murder, mayhem, they did it for real. As everyone knows the fighters in the daily Coliseum (and elsewhere in the antique world) the 'entertainers' actually killed each other; the misfit Christians were tossed to the lions for real. Now today that would be shocking. so there really is one shock line that hasn't yet been crossed. Maybe. It the early 70s there were rumors of so-called porno-snuff films in which female victims were actually said to be killed or "snuffed" on screen. I don't know if any of those rumors were true, but the idea alone was horrifying. Maybe the next action movie will record the actual shootings and axings of the actors. Then the audience can send flowers to their families. I once suggested that since the museum is the only venue where moral-societal views can be tested or transgressed in neutrality, such as 'safely' displaying a desecrated flag or religious image, they should be the location of state executions. That would bring home, i think, the reality of 'official' murder, making it a topic for moral discussion, at least. It would be far more shocking, I'm sure, that the blandly reported executions now going on behind prison walls. On the other side of the issue, one can say that the shock-bar has been crossed so many times that most people are now numb to the usual, everyday sort of transgressions like four-letter words and all sorts of sexually explicit imagery, to say nothing of headless, blown-apart corpses and blood puddles covering our living rooms in lurid 3-D TV imagery. It's freedom of speech of course. But I'm not sure that the proof of freedom of speech needs to be a great loss of civility and dignity. Why is it that freedom of speech is mostly exercised with extreme vulgarity and incivility? I can't get past page one of a daily free newspaper in Chicago without reading the f-word in several hyphenated forms. If I were to complain, I'd be blasted as a terrible anti-free-speech person, a Republican, or worse. What ever happened to well-reasoned language and good ideas? Aren't they the real substance protected by free-speech? If you want to do something radical in the arts, try doing something that's civil, passionate, and thoughtful, without the f-word and its variants in deed or image, if you can. How did Montaigne manage to write so much without resorting to ugly language? There's a model for the real free-speecher radicals to follow. wc
