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Comment by throDisASwayze | Hacker News Reader

Abromovic's art isn't for everyone, but you can't really deny that this produced some really crazy reactions.

All modern art produces strong opinions in the audience, but performance art trips a lot of peoples BS sensor.

That said, I don't know how you see the results of this and not come away at least thinking about what happened. Which is the point, and that makes it successful as art.

She is also a focal point of paranoid speculation among pizza-gate and Q types. They think that elites use her as some performance art shaman that helps them do something? Not sure what, but its bad.

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It's an attack on the human spirit in a way. The message is, "look, humanity IS truly awful." People walk away from it thinking, "Maybe everyone is evil." Now, does that serve a good purpose in this world? Seems a little satanic to me.

I had a similar thought. It seems like an attack on morality, implying that there is no true morality or God-given conscience, only fear of consequences.

> After exactly 6 hours, as planned, I stood up and started walking toward the audience. Everyone ran away, to escape an actual confrontation.

Hard to judge from the wiki page, there are so little details, but this sounds fake and staged. I think there were less stunts back then so people were more trusting. At any rate, I get strong vibes of some kind of agenda here, and you're right that it's probably not a godly one.

The bounds of morality are a social construct. So, if you stage something that is purposefully meant to create an environment that seems to be outside of society, you will get behaviour that is not bound by regular social norms and morality. It is possible that saying this was the artist's goal, but who knows.

But yes, there is no true morality. How can there be? In nature, there is only survival. A lion is happy to find some prey thas has had a stroke of bad luck and gotten stuck or hurt so it can't easily fight back.

And the previous paragraph is not meant to say that the lion is evil. No, the lion simply is.

Nature is not a model of morality though. It's a pretty linear system that offers very few choices that don't lead to death. We constructed a society where there are many more choices other than death, and in doing so defined a moral system.

> We constructed a society

That's just nature. Unless you'd argue that bonobos have "defined a moral system" because they have "constructed a society" that is built on mutual cooperation, all humans have done is find increasingly abstract ways to cause harm to one another in order to work around the natural tendency towards cooperation.

What makes human morality special is not how we support each other but how we hurt each other. And this is a fairly recent achievement even in our own species' historical timescale.

I'm assuming you don't have any free will and it's the combination of your genes and experiences that made you get to this position.

Is there a point to your statement? The existence or non-existence of free will has no discernable effect on reality (see the "philosophical zombies" thought experiment).

Of course it was staged: it was performance art! It's not like she found herself wandering through the gallery and suddenly decided to subject herself to the whim of strangers. The event was planned ahead of time.

Or do you mean the reactions of the audience sound fake/staged? In either case, what gives you that idea?

> It's an attack on the human spirit in a way. The message is, "look, humanity IS truly awful." It didn't have to be an attack on the human spirit. It was open to that, and open to something positive. But people didn't take the positive route.

> People walk away from it thinking, "Maybe everyone is evil." Now, does that serve a good purpose in this world? Seems a little satanic to me.

That's kinda weird, given that the belief that "everyone is evil" is one of the core ideas of Christianity. Well, everyone but one person, I suppose.

> the belief that "everyone is evil" is one of the core ideas of Christianity.

Huh, never heard that before.

Um. What has been your exposure to Christian theology?

Some people would probably formulate the notion of original sin as "everyone is inclined to evil" or "everyone is prone to evil" or "everyone is vulnerable to committing evil" or "everyone is broken" or "everyone needs help against evil" rather than "everyone 'is' evil".

Wouldn't that defeat the need for Jesus, then?

Maybe some of my formulations are too weak. How about "everyone has a nature that will lead him or her to do wrong and incur guilt"?

Traditionally, Christ is the savior (rescuer) from all kinds of life's ills, not only from the much-ballyhooed (in Protestant circles) fate of dying a jackass.

Views on how Atonement works are at the very core of the doctrinal differences between Christian denominations. Painting with very rough strokes, the general agreement is that without Jesus' sacrifice and the Faith, humans would be doomed to stay in sin and never be reconciled with God.

That mirrors my broad understanding as well.

I could ask you the same. Ideas like “love thy neighbour” don’t feel very “everybody is evil” to me.

I recognize that there are Christian doom cults that think everyone is evil but I’m surprised by how plainly you call that a “core belief”. It does not fit in any way the (moderate protestant) way I was raised, and it doesn’t match the beliefs of my catholic friends either. Every devout Christian I know (though I know only a few) is an optimist about humanity.

> I could ask you the same.

Raised Catholic through confirmation. Long time atheist, although I attend my wife's evangelical protestant church. So admittedly an outsider's view on all of this.

> Ideas like “love thy neighbour” don’t feel very “everybody is evil” to me.

I don't know why those would be incompatible. People can be evil, but you can love them all the same.

> I’m surprised by how plainly you call that a “core belief”.

Really? Sin and the need for Jesus's salvation are universal through the branches of Christianity I've experienced. They use different terms for it—Catholicism talks about "original sin", protestants talk about "mankind's sin nature". I know nothing about Orthodox Christianity, but I would expect them to fit in there somewhere. Catholics and Protestants argue about salvation through faith or salvation through works, but they both see it as something desirable.

There are lots of branches of Christianity, and so I don't have a full picture, but I've never heard of one that didn't share this belief, and I'm not sure I'd understand what their faith is all about at that point. But if you've got some info, I'm happy to learn more. I kinda hate to quote Wikipedia here, but it mirrors my understanding:

> The doctrine of sin is central to the Christian faith, since its basic message is about redemption in Christ. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_views_on_sin)

Maybe my outsider's take on it is off, but calling these beliefs satanic seems way out there to me.

Thanks for this info. I see what you're saying. To clarify, I meant a _little_ satanic. As in, "giving satan" vibes. Not some truly evil ritual.

> I kinda hate to quote Wikipedia here

I don't mind wikipedia but it has some weird branches. Recommended reading, start here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_ethics

From the top of that page:

> Christian ethics, also known as moral theology, is a multi-faceted ethical system. It is a virtue ethic, which focuses on building moral character, and a deontological ethic which emphasizes duty. It also incorporates natural law ethics, which is built on the belief that it is the very nature of humans – created in the image of God and capable of morality, cooperation, rationality, discernment and so on – that informs how life should be lived, and that awareness of sin does not require special revelation.

> awareness of sin does not require special revelation.

Then jump into https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_law

The link you provided highlights the word "Hamartiology" which I just learned is the study of sin. I've never heard of this study before but I have studied some Buddhist teachings. Buddhists teach that when you steady your attention on a mental object, that object grows (for example gratitude). To me, it follows that studying sin leads to increased sin.

I think many modern Christians understand this and, therefore, sin is no longer such a central tenant to the faith.

(Fwiw I didnt call anything satanic)

Thanks for the explanation. I guess our mismatch is that you think sin and evil are the same thing and I think they’re very far apart. To me, stealing a cookie from mom when she’s not watching is sinful but not evil. Murdering people is evil but I don’t think that’s what your average Christian refers to when talking about sin.

> Fwiw I didnt call anything satanic

I know, it was flkenosad who posted the message that I originally responded to.

> you think sin and evil are the same thing and I think they’re very far apart

Well, I am an outsider, so it's not so much what I believe, it's my understanding of what Christian theology teaches. And my understanding might be wrong! Catholics have "mortal sin" vs. "venial sin", for instance, but I'm not sure that's the same distinction.

By no means an expert, but I know lots of Christians. That's not how they talk. But, I mean, every church is different.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Original_sin

Different branches of Christianity have their own view on what the Original Sin means. Catholic teaching assumes that humans lost their supernatural attributes during the Fall (most importantly, perfect free will) that should have prevented them from sinning. Humans are still good, but their desires can overcome what's left of their free will. Protestant teaching tends to teach that human nature has been corrupted by the Fall and is mostly evil now.

Perhaps I'm just a cynical person, but the only reaction I had when I read about this for the first time was "look, humanity isn't that awful at all."

Satanic? Where did that come from?

My assumption is that they mean Satanic as in "representative of the worst parts of humanity" and not necessarily as in "of the devil himself"

Huh, I've never once thought of Satanic as representing that.

Being in this world for this long, there’s one thing I know for sure: Evil and apathy are the defaults. True goodness is rare. If you find it, treasure it.

The line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. - Solzhenitsyn

The sooner people realise this the better, imo.

No type of art is for everyone, and this will have plenty of "it's not art, it's just a performance" detractors.

I'm not qualified to make these judgements nor I car for them.

But I think too, that's extremely hard to ignore her experimental work in studying the relationship between a performance and the audience.

She's been an absolutely terrific pioneer in the field and her work will certainly outlive her.

I don’t see what the difference is between this performance and one of the earlier experiments in social psychology by Milgrom and Zimbardo. There’s no way she didn’t get the idea from them. So, to me, this is neither original nor interesting.

In general, I don’t see the point of conceptual art, as it presupposes that the artist has some privileged perspective on the world that they can enlighten us all with. For me, this is a problem much better suited to the scientific method. And anyway, if the only point of your art is some abstract theory, why not write it out clearly on a single sheet of paper? I know it won’t win you the Turner prize, but it will save us all a lot of time.

"Not everything that can be counted counts and not everything that counts can be counted" (attributed to Albert Einstein)

>In general, I don’t see the point of conceptual art, as it presupposes that the artist has some privileged perspective on the world that they can enlighten us all with.

The privilege is simply that they went out and did it, I think. Someone wants to see what happens when you do XYZ, they do XYZ, and that's it. I don't know why this is taken as a sign of extreme arrogance or anything.

For someone who respects the scientific method, you seem awfully dismissive of peer review...

So what if Milgrom and Zimbardo's studies in conformity already happened? We don't run an experiment once and stick with the results forever. That's patently un-scientific.

Regardless, just because you didn't understand the piece, doesn't mean it's not art, and just because you found scientific studies to be more conclusive doesn't mean that this performance failed to further our understanding.

I know this was supposed to be a demonstration of how evil humanity can become. But it failed to show humanity as gravitationally evil. Rather, it was a celebratory joy of how much humanity can be divided, how guilty it can feel, and how courageous or fake are its actions in face of conflict.

This was not art. This was a challenge. And "artist" submitted her life away.

I like her cannibal art where she has actors play dead bodies on a grazing table as the rich and famous pick food made into simulated body parts off the actors and chow down. The metaphor there is just so on point.

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