Art and Sacrifice

This'll be the first in my 3-days-3-posts marathon to make up for Monday and Friday this week (both of which will not be filled with bloggy goodness

I'm strolling over into completely foreign territory right now to talk about something that has caused me no small amount of cognitive and emotional stress- Art.
Specifically, the sacrifices made in the name of art.

What do we owe to art? What power does art have over us? What are we allowed to do for art's sake?

No doubt this breaches the worlds of ethics, personal opinion, and aesthetics, all of which are intensely subjective topics, so coming to any sort of consensus is virtually out of the question, but I think the discussion merits existence regardless.

Art has existed since our cognition. And as we've progressed, we've taken all our knowledge and attempted to turn it into objective formulas- techniques and crafts. This has led to the rise of subversive works, not just in art, but in all fields. When there is a matter of certainty to how we create, those who are "truly" creative will deliberately exit the expected avenues of creativity in order to produce something new, unexpected, shocking, fascinating, or simply delightful. This is not a new phenomenon, but much of it falls under a recently named movement- postmodernism.

Subversive art, specifically, has taken many forms, from self-torture to pictures of anuses, but in the pursuit of a more shocking and surreal experience of aestheticism, what would normally be considered "art," has dabbled in the realm of real-world consequences.

http://webecoist.momtastic.com/2009/01/10/animal-torture-art/

Animal torture art (something I literally just now found out existed).
Human self-torture art.
Art that uses people, whether willing participants or not.

What exactly is "okay" in the realm of art? Why? Have we simply grown to justify immorality for the sake of art in our quest to constantly expand our artistic horizons?

Does an action lose much of its value when it's being performed for alternative reasons?

Let me give you an example-

We have an abusive father who beats his child out of malice. A clearly abhorrent act which obviously deserves jail time and a mandatory separation of the child from the father.

Now, what if the father is an artist who's making a statement about the world through beating his child? What if his intent is artistic and the suffering being caused is merely incidental?
How do we treat this new father? What exactly is the difference?

There must be some distinction, because we don't view the two as equal crimes, but we might not be likely to view the second father's actions as "acceptable" either. So the distinction is in intention.
But what exactly does that imply about the nature of actions? That as long as you don't mean to cause pain, you're off the hook? What about negligence? What value do we place on people being so irresponsible that they would cause harm to someone without recognizing how wrong that is? Isn't that a fair description of someone who lacks empathy?
Or maybe it's not that the perpetrator is negligent, but perhaps they feel the artistic value is worth more than the suffering! Isn't that even worse? Isn't that some really twisted act of ignoring empathy?

To put it another way, I feel sorry for those who suffer from psychopathy to an extent. The inability to feel empathy forces individuals to live by a set of rules (society's rules) that are contrary to anything they can have experience of. They don't know why what they're feeling is wrong- it doesn't make sense to them. It's genuine confusion.

Contrarily, someone who has empathy, but deliberately ignores it has absolutely no excuse for causing suffering. They're valuing something over their innate capacity for empathy.

What truth is worth more than life and happiness? Art? Why does art deserve that rank and title?
(Philosophically, why does life and happiness deserve it either? Both questions are equally valid)

Reaching back to a common theme of my posts- Where and why do we draw a line for what's acceptable for the sake of art?

Is animal torture?
How about human torture?
What if the human is yourself, so it's an informed choice?
Or perhaps a masochist, so it's an informed choice?

What if you're simply starving or suffering as a result of the art, and the art has no intention towards causing the suffering? Starving artists, artists who get too lost in their oeuvre?

What if the pain being caused isn't physical, but rather emotional?

Allow me to give you a fictional scenario from a play, "The Shape of Things."

The play is about an art student who meets and befriends a museum guard. He's intrigued by her, and they eventually start dating. Throughout the play, she gives him the motivation to change a significant number of qualities about himself, from the way he dresses to the way he talks and presents himself. By the end of the play, he comes to her senior art exhibit, which turns out to be about him.
Her art project was to take him and turn him into something completely different without ever actually forcing the change on him. Her time with him was entirely used for the purposes of art and she had never had feelings for him.

The ethical implications here are... incredibly complicated to say the least.

Human experimentation for the advancement of science, medicine, and psychology has been deemed unethical provided you cannot receive informed consent (and sometimes even if you can) by participants.

But the play presents something... not quite there. Almost like human experimentation when viewed through a cracked mirror.

The choices were entirely in the hands of the male protagonist. It was always within his power to stop it, but he was also deceived into believing in a legitimate connection that wasn't there. Does that deceit constitute any sort of criminal act? An immoral act would probably be pretty easy to argue, but it's unclear if you could ever really punish someone for it.
Furthermore, while the intent was never to cause pain, the intent was to use him for ulterior purposes. In other words, he was merely a means to an end instead of an end itself.


But we're talking about extreme cases that we don't often see or hear. Let me take this into a topic that may hit a little closer to home.

What about an acting role which causes someone to commit suicide?
Were they pushed too hard by a director looking for acting that was too real?
Or perhaps they pushed themselves too hard to be the perfect artist?
Is it a justifiable loss in the name of art?

What if your spouse was in a role that required them to have sex with someone else?
What if you were absolutely not okay with it, but your spouse wanted to go through with it?
Is the pain justifiable for art?
At what point does pain stop being justifiable for art?

After all, you're an unwilling recipient of the consequences of art, but it's more complicated than that, since the actual artist is willing.

However, this is a very particular example of something that I think is really a more general phenomenon-

Theater itself uses people for the purposes of art. They, unlike the poor boyfriend in "The Shape of Things," are willingly being used. Each production of the same play with the same characters takes people from the streets to attempt to fill those roles, no matter who they are. It could be anyone so long as they fit a set of criteria to be determined by the casting director, a tool used by the artform.
The theater does not care who you are or how you came to be. All it cares about is your ability to fulfill your duty and there will be no second thought if another can fill your role better than you.

The theater wants you to perform a set of actions and say specific things, no matter how you feel about them. It's up to another arm of the art, the director, to try to make you comfortable in order to streamline the process, but ultimately, your discomfort is of little consequence to the theater.

And then you sacrifice a large amount of hours, your time, your energy, your personal life- in order to keep up with the theater's demands so that you can be a part of this art.
When push comes to shove, that simply comes down to whether or not that personal sacrifice is worth it to you, as an individual, for the sake of art.

And what exactly defines this art form? The crowd? The collaboration? The polish? Is it still art if it's a bunch of unpracticed kids on stage in front of an empty auditorium trying to recite Shakespeare?
At what point does it go from being just pretending to being art?

And at what point does suffering start to be justified by art?

At what point does pain become acceptable just because someone doesn't intend to cause that pain?



I'm viewing this entirely from the perspective of someone outside the culture who has recently had negative feelings towards it, so it's entirely possible that my limited and biased perspective is totally incapable of understanding the pull of art that causes pain. Or maybe it's something deeper. Maybe pain is beautiful and it is art?

Who knows?

I wouldn't mind hearing some differing perspectives on this as, again, mine is super biased.

-
Wade