Can art still shock?

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/jan/23/can-art-still-shock-short-history

by samclemens • 11 years ago

53 55 11 years ago

jerf2• 11 years ago

Of course it can. But A: the "masses" have simply become accustomed to the antics of the shock jockeys, and no, there probably are no longer any depth of depravity that an artist can sink to that will shock the masses any longer and B: the philosophical sensibility of modern art is also the philosophical sensibility of the modern elite.

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.

ANTSANTS6• 11 years ago

the "masses" have simply become accustomed to the antics of the shock jockeys, and no, there probably are no longer any depth of depravity that an artist can sink to that will shock the masses any longer

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.

maxerickson4• 11 years ago

You've mischaracterized that article.

(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.

jerf2• 11 years ago

You just named them. You want "shock", you have to offend the dominant philosophy of the elite (and especially the art elite), which is liberalism.

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.

GuiA• 11 years ago

Can't say too much without giving spoilers, but the British scifi series Black Mirror touches precisely on this in one of its episodes. It was quite well done.

thret• 11 years ago

Do you mean the first episode? I think they can be viewed freely online http://www.channel4.com/programmes/black-mirror/

carsongross• 11 years ago

Sure. It could take all the scorn it's heaped on Christianity for the last seventy years, and heap it on Islam.

Dare ya.

IvyMike• 11 years ago

Making fun of your own culture is very different than making fun of a different culture.

brazzy• 11 years ago

You mean the thing that conservative pundits have been doing pretty much nonstop for at least 13.5 years while constantly whining about how political correctness is violating their first amendement rights?

mynameishere• 11 years ago

Make an art exhibit about how the Holocaust (TM) is a political prop and you'll see whether art can still shock--in Europe you might see it all the way to your prison cell. Obviously, contemporary artists are almost top-to-bottom slaves to the politics of the day.

quadrangle• 11 years ago

There's a distinction between "offend" and "shock".

girvo• 11 years ago

Is there really though? I think not, personally, they seem like synonyms in practice as far as modern day "offence" and "shock" goes. See: any Twitter lynch mob.

Vaskivo2• 11 years ago

They are different concepts but, in this context, they amount to the same.

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.

ForHackernews2• 11 years ago

ITT: Neo-reactionaries cutting themselves on their own edginess.

IgorPartola2• 11 years ago

There are still things that can shock people. Anything can be called art. Therefore, yes, "art" can still shock people. QED

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.

dagw3• 11 years ago

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.

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.

beobab• 11 years ago

Now if the vending machine were to deliver an electric charge sufficient to be classed as a shock, or injure the buyer sufficiently so that they didn't die outright, but instead went into shock, then I think it could be classed as art which shocks.

However, it would obviously also be classed as either dangerous or illegal (depending on which one you got).

coldpie• 11 years ago

I went to a local modern art museum about two years ago (the Walker in Minneapolis). I've been aware of the perception of modern art as "throwing paint on a canvas randomly" or "leaning two sticks together" and thought it was just a patronizing criticism from those more familiar with the form. So I decided to go check out a museum and see for myself what the actual art form was like.

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.

IgorPartola2• 11 years ago

I think the problem is that if we start defining art, we quickly get into the territory of having lots of false negatives. There are lots of things that are now considered art, and are quite enjoyable, that would not have been art in the past. The dogmatic approach doesn't work. However, leaving it completely open lets people do the "lean two sticks together" thing. It can also be much much worse than that. I remember reading about an exhibit someone was doing where they were letting a dog starve over several weeks while on display. The dog died. Shocking? Yes. Art? No.

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.

rasz_pl• 11 years ago

Yes, and no.

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.

bitwize• 11 years ago

A more relevant question is "is it supposed to?" Is the standard of Duchamp the only or highest standard by which we assign artistic value?

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".

pfortuny• 11 years ago

Exactly: did the author of the "Code of Hammurabi" shock? Did the sculptor of the see of Tutankhamen shock? Did Michaelangelo "shoc? Did Bach "shock"?

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.

maxerickson4• 11 years ago

You may be trampling jargon. I find plenty of the art here pleasing:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_art

("contemporary" describes art currently being produced in a less ambiguous way)

7Z7• 11 years ago

Gore and sex are exactly as important to art as the artist and the audience see fit.

You are also conflating how shocking a piece is to the artist's intent to create a shocking piece. They are not necessarily related.

jeorgun• 11 years ago

"Shock" doesn't necessarily imply shocking referent. Beethoven was shocking; Monet was shocking; Stravinsky was shocking, but none of them were shocking because of their subject matter. I think the kind of "shocking" art that they created is more what the article's talking about.

TheSisb2• 11 years ago

A lot of 'shock' is taking something considered some form of 'sacred' (like sex, religion, etc) and making a mockery of that 'sacred' thing or way of thinking.

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?

theorique• 11 years ago

There's a lot of heterogeneity in what people consider sacred nowadays, and probably less illusion of a shared consensus. For example, the "shocking" comics in Charlie Hebdo are genuinely religiously offensive in the Moslem world, intellectually offensive to some liberals in the West who think that the comics are rude to a religious minority, and not offensive to a great many secular or otherwise non-Moslem people.

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".

Humjob• 11 years ago

I find the premise of the article rather silly, though I still enjoyed reading it. From my experience in interacting with college students, media workers and business executives we're living in an era of hair-trigger shock instincts, where a sizable minority of the population jumps at the chance to be 'offended' and 'shocked' on behalf of whatever is the oppressed group or social issue of the week, thereby gaining power for themselves by seizing a newly constructed moral high ground.

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.

rfrey3• 11 years ago

My wife took a class in "provocation theatre" during her masters degree in drama. An assignment was to do a "shock piece". There was the usual round-up of naked people, simulated excrement, 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.

Vaskivo2• 11 years ago

So she was goint to fail because she succeeded flawlessly on the assignment.

iamds• 11 years ago

Things that didn't happen, this.

67726e2• 11 years ago

This brought to mind the documentary series Metal Evolution[0] and the episode on shock rock. The episode progressed from the origins of the genre to what we have today, from Alice Cooper to Marilyn Manson and to Rammstein. What would probably be the money quotes come from Alice Cooper and Till Lindemann, of Rammstein. Everyone was asked the question "what would it take to shock an audience today" - Cooper said something along the lines of eating your own arm. Lindemann said killing oneself on stage might do it. Something that struck me when I started writing this comment is how I don't even consider Rammstein's schtick one bit shocking, and considering the finale of the last concert I attended involved Till riding a giant phallus cannon spraying white foam on the audience while singing a song titled "Pussy". Seeing that in an arena with 15,000 other people would probably have been inconceivable just a generation ago, and makes some of Manson's tearing up a bible look innocent, which in turn made Cooper's guillotine routine and boa constrictor look quite quaint.

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.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metal_Evolution

pantalaimon• 11 years ago

In the same vein, there was an interesting article about how radical Islam is appealing to the youth as a rebellion against contemporary society.

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...

JonnieCache• 11 years ago

I think stewart lee managed it with his 2006 show "90s Comedian," mainly for the last 30 minutes. The subject matter is pretty nasty, I'm not going to reprint it here for fear of bringing up peoples breakfasts, but the reason it was shocking was because there's no punchline. He doesn't even look like he's enjoying himself, he just slogs through this half hour of stomach churning material, with no payoff at all. It's genuinely difficult to deal with, even if the subject matter doesn't "offend" you.

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.

Htsthbjig• 11 years ago

When Galileo published "Sidereus Nuncius" it was shocking because if what it said was true, like it was, the entire social hierarchy built over false principles would collapse, like it did.

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.

pavlov• 11 years ago

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.

Kenji• 11 years ago

Yes just draw Muhammad.

commentzorro• 11 years ago

Also, yes: 2G1C. (That was supposed to be art, right?)

stefanix• 11 years ago

Viennese Actionism could be repeated with a good shock value in many cities today. It's vile but very effective in breaking tradition and creating a fresh start.

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.

joeyspn• 11 years ago

Yes. In one word: BANKSY

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WDIz7mEJOeA

davidgerard• 11 years ago

Answer: "yes, but when it does it's hardly ever elevated to reification as 'art'."

Can art still shock?

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