Can art still shock?
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
Want to shock the average person who considers himself an 'intellectual' or 'politically enlightened?' Say something inegalitarian (whether it's true or not doesn't really matter in terms of the emotional impact it will cause) about a population group other than southern whites.
Other fun hot topics include eugenics/dysgenics and the cultural attitudes and government policies that drive population quality, the concept of population quality itself, immigration and whether it should be restricted, whether the 2-parent family unit is important to society's long-run health and how feminism played a role in its decline, etc.
As a trial balloon Heather said she was going to get a pastor from a local church to come up on stage and sing the Lord's Prayer with his seven-year old son. The outrage from her classmates and teacher at the mere suggestion of this was incredible.
The indignation came from two sources - those who claimed they were being judged for their art and she was trying to redeem them, etc., and those who thought it was basically child abuse. She was basically told (by her "provocation theatre" professor) it would be the end of her degree if she pulled such a stunt.
If it is important to you, my email is in my profile - I'll tell you the year, department, and university in question.
rodfrey at g mail
It seems each generation has become "desensitized" and it would take an act more shocking than ever before to provoke a reaction. But in an age where you can pull up the most depraved acts of sex and violence at will, people are finding themselves (acting?) shocked at something so laughable it seems unbelievable.
The term is really just something for the previous generation to apply to something they find distasteful or scary. Sitting here writing about it really made me comprehend that term. I suppose +1 for rubber ducking.
> Noise, wild music - has ceased to function as a provocation. An important factor for the Salafist movement is asceticism: voluntary renunciation of what young people - at least ostensibly - consider fun. Social life like in the early Middle Ages, which is now provocation at its best.
https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=y&pr...
So, err, who exactly are artists expecting to "shock"? The elite that already agrees with them, or the masses that have long since stopped paying attention?
You want to shock? You're going to have to attack the dominant philosophical sensibility, not echo it. I'm not sure the artists have been echoing the dominant elite sensibility so monolithically at any point in history since the Enlightenment.
Just the other day there was an article on here about some guy outraged about big breasted women in comic books for adolescent boys, comics about as wholesome as Family Circus in the grand scheme of things. A certain group cheered as GTA V was pulled from stores in Australia on account of their petitions, and they almost got Hatred banned from Steam too. Respected news organizations like the BBC publish such articles without the faintest hint of irony: https://a.pomf.se/odchri.png
If common people are actively protesting, petitioning, and colluding to censor art for portraying elements of the human condition as banal as sexuality and violence, we still have a long way to go towards mass enlightenment.
That said, if you can name any sacred cows ripe for the slaughter, I'd be happy to listen.
(well, if you mean this one: http://www.itinthed.com/16328/what-taking-my-daughter-to-a-c... )
The author isn't outraged at all. He wants something different for his daughter than is available at the store, and he tells the tale as if he gained new perspective, but there is nothing resembling protesting, petitioning, and colluding to censor art in the article I link.
> “All their…” …and her voice dropped to a whisper… “boobies are hanging out, Dad. These can’t be for kids, and comic books are for kids, and kids aren’t supposed to see that. That Wonder Woman looks like she’s in a video, and I don’t know who that is, but it’s not Harley Quinn. Harley Quinn wears clothes.”
Yeah, I'm sure his kid said this.
EDIT: Damn, random anonymous downvoter on HN, downvoted within less than a minute of my reply to an article that fell off the front page hours ago. This is not the first time you've done that, either. Do you just sit there refreshing the comment pages of "problematic" posters all day? Do you have an RSS feed of my posts? Did you actually write a downvote bot to police a glorified reddit clone? I'm flattered to have made your list, but jesus christ, go outside or something.
Lots of people surf https://news.ycombinator.com/newcomments, I wouldn't read too much into rapid downvotes.
As for the article, I would summarize it like so: "I'm drawing a link between mild fanservice in superhero comic books and male chauvinism and sexual harassment in the tech industry, and also think of the childrens." Seems pretty anti-sex to me.
Downvoting for disagreement is allowed, but I still think it's a dumb policy. I upvote people I disagree with all the time for moving discussion along with pointed questions, so it's saddening to see people downvoted or be downvoted myself merely for holding an opinion contrary to the hivemind. Not because I give a flying fuck about internet points, but because it reflects poorly on the community and its capacity for debate. But then again, I think upvote systems are dumb to begin with.
That said, there's still a difference between "I'm shocked, shocked I say! Everybody come join me in telling me how good I am for being shocked!" (both major dominant sides do this today), and actual shock. All of your examples are the former. I'm not sure there much left for the latter.
Later edit: I'm an audience the shock artists would love to "shock", and my parents are nominally their exact target, and let me tell you that if my father woke up one day and read that an artist had literally crucified himself unto literal death in Times Square, he still probably wouldn't be "shocked" in any sense the artist would have been looking for. Maybe conservatives in the 50s could live in a bubble, and I do mean only maybe (many of them were in a vicious war, after all) since I didn't live then, but I know for a fact today that "the masses" are already used to swimming in a culture they don't own.
Further, upon more reflection: "The masses" don't respect the shock artists today. It's hard to imagine how to shock people who don't respect you. Also, if you examine the theory of why the artists are trying to be shocking in the first place (in a nutshell, turning conservatives into liberals by "shocking" them out of their "comfortable" world or something), it's pretty difficult to draw a sensible cause-to-effect line on the whole theory anyhow. Given that one of the few scientifically-well-established differences between the two cultures is in their reaction to "disgust", stimulating conservative's "disgust" reaction (the usual shock approach) seems more like a way designed to make conservatives more conservative rather than less.
I agree with your thoughts about "shock" as we know it being a tool of political conversion that modern conservatives have learned to tune out, but I wouldn't discount the effect of some different kind of shock on modern liberals. Certain people pretend to be shocked and offended when anyone so much as disagrees with them, but they're mostly using this offense as a tool, part (as you say) "look how offended and thus good I am!" and part "now I have another person to point to as the source of 'the problem.'" But I am genuinely curious about how one would go about actually shocking those people. What first comes to mind is outspoken, public, mass disagreement with liberal norms, done proudly and on the public's own terms rather than the meek "give me a chance, guys, I so agree with you about X Y and Z but maybe W" contrarianism you usually see. I think this is exactly why people have gotten themselves whipped up into such a furor over Gamergate and anonymous messageboards; the offended have done an excellent job of reframing the controversy in terms of misogyny and neckbeards, but the sheer magnitude of the response on both sides indicates that some kind of shock is afoot.
Lee can sometimes be annoying and pretentious, but that show is a masterclass in "shock" humor in a way that the likes of Boyle et al can't or won't do. Johnny Vegas is good at it too.
There's still a thick layer of irony covering it all though. I think the only way you could make truly shocking art now would be to cut your own throat live on stage or something.
Here I'll give an example: create a vending machine which only accepts $100 bills. Then instead of vending anything, simply spray the face of the buyer with cold water. Watch, as they kick the crap out of that vending machine.
To be fair, I am not a fan of modern art. I prefer more quant things that require more skill. Painting a human face is difficult. Painting it such that it expresses an emotion that the viewer can recognize and sympathize with is orders of magnitude more difficult. Throwing feces at a wall or screwing a few boards together, for the most part, is not difficult or unique. IMO of course.
Would that really shock people? It might shock the first person who used it (although it would probably just anger them), but would it shock the people watching or someone who just read about it? I very much doubt it. If you read about the piece you described in a newspaper article about the latest exhibition at a local museum, would you be shocked? Most people would probably just roll their eyes at the banality of it.
Shocking or even genuinely and emotionally engaging with an audience at any real level is really really hard and doing so in a novel way that we haven't seen dozens of times before is an order of magnitude harder again and that is where the true challenges of contemporary art lies. And I'll be the first to admit that most artists fall very very short.
However, it would obviously also be classed as either dangerous or illegal (depending on which one you got).
Holy crap what a waste of time. "Screwing a few boards together" described one of the exhibits. The paragraph describing the exhibit outside the door said something about the artist's reflection of his house growing up or something. But it was just a few boards, rotten oranges, and a TV playing something or other. What the hell?
Another exhibit was a long hallway with two rolled up pieces of construction paper stood on either end. Okay.
Nothing else in the museum even merits derision, it was so dull.
So yeah, modern art deserves its mocking and crap reputation. I guess someone must enjoy it.
Here's a good working definition of art I like: "Art isn't art until it's sold. Until then it's an obsession and a storage problem." Not saying it has to be actually sold, but if it's something someone would buy, then yes it's art, at least to a first approximation.
Great artists like Goya, Van Gogh, Renoir wanted to express something that they felt and they just did not care if it created scandal, but scandal was not the main objective. For example Goya wanted to express the horror he had seen in the Spanish independence war against Napoleon, even when some people suggested him not to do it.
The same happened with Michael Servetus, or Darwin,Voltaire, Freud, all those people were really shocking, but shock was not what they wanted.
But that great advances are shocking does not mean that anything shocking is an advance.
Artist started using "shock for profit" with the advent of the media. With Television and radio just shocking alone could be incredible profitable, and they started taking advantage of it.
People like Dalí(for me a great artist) started cultivating eccentricities not just in their art but in their lives because it sold very well(and it let him life very well doing what he loved to do).
In fact Dalí was very respectful with other people, he lived his life like he wanted but let other people live the life they wanted too.
But soon it became what everybody did, specially mediocre artist that believed they were genius for offending other people, and people developed anti bodies and started just ignoring them.
Just offending someone else does not make you Dalí.
Now evolution and Big Bag are the big dogmas. They are the status quo today. They are not teached as theories that could be improved or even replaced in the future with something better, but as what already happened, no doubt about them. You see people talking about the first femtoseconds of the Universe with absolute confidence.
How did cosmologists acquire the confidence to speculate about the first moments of the Universe? By spending a century developing theories that were continously improved and replaced.
Nobody came down the mountain bearing stone tablets inscribed with the concepts of red shift, cosmic background radiation or cosmological inflation. These concepts were radically anti-dogmatic in their time. Today's theories will probably be overthrown by something similarly radical eventually.
The best art, I've found, lifts the soul and can even have a transformative effect on the observer. This does not preclude shocking art, but can be achieved even with purely abstract forms without a representative referent, let alone a shocking one.
I think it's time we open a discussion on what we hope to achieve with art, one that involves the Katy-Perry-listening, Marvel-movie-watching public and not just the "art world".
People did not resort to art as a path for shock. Even pornography (as Herculan and Pompey prove) was not "shocking".
Gore and sex are not important to art. It has other issues more relevant.
The question to me is... Can modern art please? It does not seem to.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_art
("contemporary" describes art currently being produced in a less ambiguous way)
You are also conflating how shocking a piece is to the artist's intent to create a shocking piece. They are not necessarily related.
If an artist poops on a bible in a forest and there was no one there to see it, did it really happen?
The problem is with media shielding public from shocking/provocative/indecent content in fear of said public switching channel.
Im not even talking "The Aristocrats!" here, something as innocent as a nipple might shock quite a few people in US.
As jerf said, people are kind of used to shock-jockeys nowadays by being aware of that repetitive pattern, but there is still that potential laying all over the place. If nothing is deemed 'sacred', are we better off?
Similarly, art in the West that would have shocked as recently as the 1950s is now greeted with an eye roll and "this again? Probably just a stunt."
Furthermore, the chance to take offense and be a moral scold seems to have become equal opportunity - as concepts like feminism and multiculturalism gained influence over the past few decades, being offensive to left-wing taboos is increasingly "shocking". Whereas previously, a person might be tried for "obscenity" (against morality or Christianity or public order), now he might be tried for "human rights offenses" or "cultural insensitivity".
I am not convinced we have a lack of shock potential. People just seem to have less need for shock ... and probably too much cable news.
There is no harm in being offended. There is no harm in being shocked. I want art that offends me. I want art the shocks me.
Dare ya.