mUseems are damned if they do, damned if they don’t. Ignore past problems and criticize them for being problematic. Rewrite their labels according to changing politics and call them didactic and woke. The truth is that history is full of immoral art. But how do we know it when we see it? And what, if anything, should we do about it?
In her timely and influential new book, philosopher Daisy Dixon explores some of the most controversial artworks ever created. She is interested in how an artist’s character can influence their creations, and what harmful effects those creations can have on the world.
She is not the first. Plato feared the power of art to corrupt citizens, while Oscar Wilde celebrated its provocative potential. More recently, Claire Dederer considered the problem of what we should do with great art about bad guys in her 2023 book Monsters.
However, come to Depraved expecting a traditional approach to art history and you will be disappointed. Traditional media ranging from prehistory to the present, including paintings, novels, and plays, as well as more contemporary “art forms” such as video games; There’s also a long tangent on pornography. Some things are so disgusting that it’s hard to read about them. There is talk of grinding live goldfish in a blender in the name of performance art, and a film shows shocking scenes of pedophilia. The video game Rape Day needs no explanation, but Dixon won’t let you look away.
Corruption, she writes, may be hidden beneath the surface of a “beautiful oil-soaked canvas”. “What’s wrong with this beautiful picture?” She asks about Titian’s The Rape of Europa, a shocking 16th-century painting of a princess being dragged into the salty sea by Jupiter, king of the gods, in the guise of a bull. “Well, it tells us that sexual violence is attractive and erotic. It tells us that ‘no’ doesn’t count as a real refusal; women, deep down, desire this kind of violation.” But the texture! Bright colors! Raw emotion! I find myself weary before accepting that maybe the bull has dewy eyes and a garland of flowers to do Making pain beautiful.
According to the author, art can be corrupted in five ways: it can show immoral conditions; To cause someone to do a bad thing; convey a dangerous message; Made by an unethical artist; Or made in an ethically questionable manner. Forget good intentions. In 2017, protests broke out over Dana Schutz’s contribution to the Whitney Biennial, a painting of the dismembered body of Emmett Till, a 14-year-old black boy who was murdered in 1955 after being falsely accused of flirting with a white woman. Schutz’s aim was to present white repentance. The overriding response was that the use of black pain as material was appropriation. “Artistic speech can be corrupt even when expressed in good faith,” writes Dixon.
How does art change our moral compass? According to ancient writers, the first Greek statue of a naked woman was so lifelike that a man attempted to have sex with her before throwing himself off a cliff in shame. Ian Brady and Myra Hindley, who sexually assaulted and murdered five children in and around Manchester in the 60s, were avid readers of the “sadistic” oeuvre of the Marquis de Sade. In the 1990s, Marilyn Manson and his band were accused of corrupting disillusioned youth.
What should our response be? Dixon isn’t shy about answering. In the past, pieces deemed too corrupt for the public eye were kept in secret collections. She believes that corrupt art is not something to be taken away, but to be confronted “loudly, angrily, beautifully”: sentiments that capture the spirit of this passionate book which, like rewritten labels in museums, is going to delight some, and surprise others. “There is a solution,” Dixon writes. Better speech. Better art. better curation” She describes it as very simple.
