The Morality and Immorality of Art

It's a longstanding problem, but it bears repeating, this time in words from Denis Dutton's The Art Instinct:

"Arts encounters with morality and politics are made difficult by the fact that moral and social systems require rules to be observed and obeyed. Moral or legal systems essentially ask that people be good, and prefer (or require) narratives to promote that end. Art's most essential requirement is not that the characters it fictively portrays be good but that they be interesting."

A few years earlier, Harold Bloom told Charlie Rose, "I refuse to say that the function of studying canonical works is to reinforce our moral suppositions." (See http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-3614849423230018899.)

They underscore a debilitating situation for educators trying to sustain the arts in the secondary school curriculum. How do they justify them? Other subjects have ready-made rationales: students must study U.S. history and civics in order to be responsible citizens; they must study reading and writing in order to acquire workplace skills; they must study math and science because our nation needs to compete with India and China in the race for technology. What do novels, paintings, porticos, and nocturnes do?

Arts educators sometimes opt for the moral benefit. When I was at the National Endowment for the Arts visiting elementary and high schools around the country, meeting with state arts leaders, and speaking to arts organizations, I heard it over and over. The arts, they maintained, make us better people. We imagine other lives, apprehend other experiences, see the world through different eyes and ears.

The problem is: sometimes that's true, sometimes it's not.

People read and view and listen for as many reasons as there are human motives. They may like a book because it sensitizes them to another's suffering, or because it lets them enjoy another's suffering. The benefits range from the benevolent to the prurient, the true to the biased.

Put it this way, would anybody deny the artistic power of The Birth of a Nation, even though its premier in Atlanta helped inspire the re-founding of the Ku Klux Klan in 1915? (The first Klan was suppressed in 1870 by Federal law.)

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Comments

1. chuckkle - July 25, 2009 at 12:35 am

The phrase "artistic power" is slippery here. Some might interpret this as placing The Birth of a Nation in the list of canonical Great Films. Others might see that "power" as a reason to protest or object to the manifest content of the film. (Which indeed did happen: the early history of the NAACP was shaped by protesting the film.) Perhaps almost everyone can agree it is a powerful film. But does that mean it should be taught as a Masterpiece (as it was for many years by many teachers)? Or that it should be taught simply as "art" without reference to its interpretation of US history, its view of African Americans, or its reception? Above many others, this film seems to call for an ideological and cultural analysis. Chuck Kleinhans

2. 22027212 - July 25, 2009 at 09:27 am

Art, at its best, strives to relay a truth of some kind. Consider Picasso's Guernica, for example: widely considered his best and most powerful, the painting shows the horrors of war. It shows--arguably-- the worst impulses of human beings and the consequences of that behavior. However, there are many people throughout history who have encouraged and supported wars; there are many who would argue war often promotes a greater good. So who's to determine what "goodness" is? As members of society, we are required to wear many masks in the roles we carry out. We get messages from mainstream media and social institutions that tell us how we should be in the world. Art is one refuge from that: it allows the masks to slip for a moment and the entire truth to peep out, which includes the often-ugly side of human emotions and actions. To not encourage art among students would be to manufacture a legion of automatons, controlled by the government and corporations. Art is essential to freedom and understanding the truth. Once the truth is clear, people are then free to choose to be good.

3. reincarnate - July 26, 2009 at 08:43 pm

The ambiguity of art's place in society is the price we pay for being a morally relativistic nation. There are no standards by which we can determine the value of anything from art to artichokes.I agree that art does have value in that it makes thing clear-er, butit does not necessarily makes the truth clear. "Truth" is dependent upon space, time, and place. What art does allow is for us to become more aware that there are choices to be made as to what constitutes truth, and aware that these choice are always --- like scientific hypotheses --- contingent.

4. zach123 - July 27, 2009 at 02:27 am

As soon as someone -- or some group of people -- start dictating the proper "moral aims" for art, the resulting art becomes inauthentic and therefore uninteresting. Just look at all of that Soviet-era literature that tried to exemplify the spirit of self-sacrifice and solidarity with the working classes. Does anyone read those books anymore? No. But people the world over still read Madame Bovary (the heroine of which is a greedy, adulterous sociopath), In Search of Lost Time (main characters are adulterous, snobby, pedantic aristocrats), and Moby Dick and Macbeth (where we identify with main characters who are death-obsessed lunatics). If the above descriptions sound harsh, it's because, as we experience these characters, we see that they are actually much more complex than our platitudinous catch-phrases could ever hope to tidily encapsulate. In life, sensible people would try to stay as far away from Madame Bovary as possible, but readers across decades have flocked to imaginative encounters with her. Harold Bloom thinks that literature is distinct from our everyday notions of morality, not because we can't *bring in* our own moral ideals, but because when we read these stories, we're supposed to react to them as full-fledged imaginative experiences. Bloom thinks that "aesthetic power" is the only relevant criterion for whether a book succeeds or not. So many things go into this: powers of language, plotting, metaphor, characterization, etc. To burden an author with the responsibility of making us better people makes little sense. Artists do not tell us what is right and what is wrong. They are, to paraphrase Flaubert, ideally so abstracted out of existence when we encounter their work that what we see is an image of life itself, not a description of how we should perceive or should react to life. All we should ask of artists is that their work be a genuine expression of their creative drives. If the results are offensive or uninspiring, we're free to ignore them. After all, no one is forcing me to buy the undoubtedly violent and disgusting novels by Chuck Palahniuk or Brett Easton Ellis. Work that is successful and long-lasting will express some authentic insights into the human experience.