Ethical Responsibility of Art
 

i am writing a paper on this subject and wondered if any of yall could point me towards some essays/philosophers/treatises or even poems/novels that address this issue. i am of course finding these things on my own as well, but anything you guys happen to know of that could inform my thesis would be appreciated.

(cardboard...you've got to have something for me, right?)

Well that's a very wide swath. Do you have any direction you'd like to move in?

the paper i am writing is sort of sparked by chinua achebe's famous essay on heart of darkness, "an image of africa" where he argues that conrad is a racist and heart of darkness is racist and therefore heart of darkness should not be considered art nor conrad an artist. i disagree with this on the most basic level because i do not believe that something is any-less art because it comes from a racist perspective. and i don't believe that art has any ethical or moral responsibility--so essentially i am arguing for aestheticism (which achebe has called a "piece of deodorized dog shit").

Ha, well then.

As for authors, I'll do some research. However what you'd probably find more favorable is the battle we've had in America is overall censorship. Anytime an "N" word was asked to be removed, editing out things like cigarettes, and booze.

For what my opinions worth, to assume Art has any ethical responsibility is in many respects an attack on expression. And there has been nothing more fascist, nor has there been a road steeper toward it, than imposing any standard on expression.

I'll get back to you.

I think "What is Art?" by Tolstoy would be a good reference point, although he's offering the exact opposite argument you are. Clive Bell in his writing talks about the purpose of art being to offer the "peculiar emotion" which can only be delivered by art, so that might be closer to the aestheticism argument you're going for. Andre Breton talks about art as a gateway to a higher experience of reality, and Hans Hoffman believes similarly but in more spiritual terms. Then you have people like Ad Reinhardt who believe that "art is art and everything else is everything else," which is to say, the only point of art is to be art, or rather, to not be anything else that isn't art... :p: Sol LeWitt talks about art as the manufacturing of ideas, but not just any idea... art ideas. Robert Motherwell and Sartre are good sources for talking about art as the expression of individuality, which Foucault and Derrida will then tear to pieces.

I personally do believe that art has an ethical responsibility, otherwise, what's the point? That doesn't mean I think there should be a limit on the feelings and situations art can express or simulate, but I think they should be placed in an ethical context. For example, I think there is a place for angry music, and anger can be a good driving force behind music, but I don't think the purpose of a song should ever be to provoke anger, but rather to show music as an outlet for sublimating anger.

Also, the idea of not imposing any standards on expression seems pretty silly. Don't you impose standards on your expression? I mostly try to say things I think will help other people or which they will at least appreciate in some way. If I just talked for the sake of talking all the time I'd probably get on peoples' nerves and I would feel bad about that.

I'm pretty much one of those uncultured aestheticists. That is how I rate everything.

People who expect the meaning of life from art are miserable twats, as there is no meaning to life and even if there was, how lazy it must be to demand that artists point it out for you instead of trying to figure it out youself.

Really? You've always seemed to project the exact opposite viewpoint.

you're going to need to define "art" in order to pull this off. as long as you provide a working definition that is absolutely independent of whatever values an individual places on an art object, then you can easily debunk any idiot who says offensive art should not be called art.

this would a very good place to start:

Alfred Gell, 1998, Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory

it's oop and damned expensive, but your uni library will surely have a copy...

Is that what he's saying? I was pretty sure by ethical responsibility he meant should it promote good social values. I don't think anyone condemned an artists right to have an emotional response. I would think saying that art did have an ethical responsibility would do more to curb things like anger and emotion than it would do to promote that ethos.

I'm a little confused by your post, but from what I understand Achebe's problem with Heart of Darkness is that he doesn't believe that a work that perpetuates negative (and untrue) stereotypes about black people should be considered a (great) work of art. However, I think Conrad's descriptions of Africa and black people are mostly based in ignorance, and his work does have the ethical imperative of confronting the darkness humanity is capable of rather than remaining asleep in a state of dazed naivite. Kurtz dies crying "the horror! the horror!" not "heart of darkness fuck yeah!" if you see what I'm getting at. So from my perspective it does take on an ethical responsibility, even if it falls short of fulfilling it, and that responsibility in turn leads it into dark territories (of the soul). The book isn't about "look at how evil Africa and black people are" but "look at how evil we all have the potential to be, better stay wary and aware..."

I think I get what you're saying here, but if I'm reading you correctly this would open a massive world of variables.

Who's to say the author grasps the moral issues at hand? Or has the compass to give him the ability to by empathetic to a given moral situation? Are we ready to punish the person for genuine lack of knowledge? If what you're saying about Achebe's position is true, it puts the onus on the writer not the reader. My problem with that is, its essentially asking authors to be a guiding compass to any given read and furthermore assumes that we should listen.

It also starts carving into the path of the writer. I remember sitting in a fiction workshop and some kid wrote a story about 4 townie kids sitting around and calling each other "fags" because they wouldn't man-up and talk to women or drink beer fast enough. The author of that piece was ripped to shreds, likely for the same reason Achebe is attempting to take on Conrad - its not terribly PC. The problem I have with that is that for better or worse, thats how townie people talk.

I hope you understand I'm not arguing with you, CA. But whats being proposed here is that we're so enamored with social justice, that we aren't even allowed to write about social injustice. We can no longer put a face on it.

What confuses me about your latest response is that it seems to contradict the first one in this thread that you've made. To clarify let me ask you this - should Conrad write the way he did, or do you think he was a failed writer for doing so?

in my opinion, aestheticism is the first experience the viewer or reader has with a finished piece of art. based on this, i would say that it is not necessary or even perfunctory for the creator of said art to concern themselves with the many facets of what popular opinion says is or isn't art, in that it is not the artists responsibility to create a world-view that people will adopt and implement as art is driven by impulse, and impulse is biological.

so, in my opinion, chinua achebe can shove it, because artists generally have control over a couple of rooms and some utensils. if someone wants to bitch about art, get them to turn the f*cking tv on and see what our politicians are creating.

I guess the reason my post seems contradictory is because an author might believe they are carrying out their ethical responsibility while a reader would disagree. To take an extreme case, we could consider a neo-nazi who writes in a glorifying manner about a group of neo-nazis killing a jewish kid. As a reader, I would believe that that author has failed at fulfilling his ethical responsibility as an artist, and the piece would strike me more as trash than art. However, if the author genuinely believes that Jews are evil and the deed was heroic, from their standpoint they have fulfilled their ethical responsibility.

So, to piggy-back on what you were saying about the kid in the writing group, a piece could present this situation, of the neo-nazis killing a jewish kid, but for me to consider the piece artistic it would have to present the situation in a negative light, or at least in a way that highlights the tragedy and senselessness of the deed rather than glorifying it.

It's up to the reader to determine whether a work succeeds in its ethical responsibility, and can be considered art, but I think the author should always keep ethical considerations in mind when composing their work. In most cases this is pretty simple, since it just means staying away from glorifying violence and hate. It gets more complicated if you have an author who is deliberately composing situations which are extremely morally ambiguous, since that's their perogative, and such situations are probably interesting, but at the same time it's unclear why you would want to present an audience with them. If, as an author, you can't figure out the morality of the situations you yourself have drafted I think maybe you should stay away from them, because presenting them seems somewhat irresponsible. I guess that's a bit general though, so it would be easier for me to consider a specific example of that.

I don't think Conrad was a failed writer, because for me, as a reader, the ethical considerations of Heart of Darkness are pretty clear and I can appreciate the message. The racist aspects are easy enough for me to ignore and attribute to ignorance, and I don't feel like they encourage me to believe that black people are evil, but simply that environments exist which breed evil and which can pull men very deep into an abyss.

I don't quite understand this question. Why does art need to have an ethical responsibility in order to have a point, (I am assuming, by point, that you mean the purpose)?

You are arguing whether it is good for art to have an ethical responsibility, not whether it actually has one in reality. Those are completely different questions, and one does have supremacy over the other, namely the latter.

How is this a "responsibility" though? If anything, the standard you give has absolutely nothing to do with "responsibility" and everything to do with what the outcome will do to you. Look at your reason for not talking all the time.

It's not that I don't talk for the sake of talking all the time because I would feel bad, but because I would be bringing suffering to others. Because of the person I am, bringing suffering to others would also bring suffering to me, which is not to say that not bringing suffering to others is automatically going to make me feel good.

I believe art needs to have an ethical responsibility to have a point because art presents its audience with some portion of reality. Why? Even if the reason is "because it's pretty," for me at least, that pretiness has to do with presenting a standard of harmony and order, or tension and the course to its resolution. Or even, in some cases, a sustained tension that leads us gradually to stop perceiving it as tension, which is a way of finding inner peace. But if we're considering something like literature I think the main point of describing situations and narratives would be to show how they can be resolved or avoided or at least to point them out so that people can understand and learn to deal with their gravity. Anything that neglects all these ideals strikes me as masturbatory, or, worse, pointlessly provocative.

Ultimately, the primary motive is for your own benefit. In this case, you wish to avoid pain.

I completely agree that it is necessary that art have some underlying ethical theme at the bottom of it, even if it is hidden in something as simple as harmony and order.

Art is required by definition to have some sort of ethical theme. I don't think that art has to communicate any certain ethical themes by virtue of what it is. Art can communicate the most vile ethical themes and still be art. I would say that art that does communicate the evil would be bad art, but I wouldn't deny that it is art.

I think the word responsibility is the main problem I have with it. A phrasing such as "art has an ethical responsibility" makes it seems like art must convey my ethics, or rather the ethics, in order for it to be art. The idea of "responsibility" has gone down the drain these days, anyways. The only responsibilities one can have are responsibilities that one has by virtue of what they are, and the responsibilities that one has based on what they will be. These days, "responsibilities" are just actions that you must do because of a certain social norm. I guess I took the OPs question to be less metaphysical, and instead as one that was concerned more with an ethical standard.

I don't really make distinctions between "art" and "not art" anymore.

If art HAS to have some ethical/moral purpose than I'm not an art person because both visually and musically I value the aesthetic results more than the cause or inspiration for the work itself, if that means I'm not treating it the way art is meant to be treated than that's too bad. I'm a low culture dumbass.

It doesn't mean I don't think about the themes being explored in a work of art and I do highly value art that sparks the imagination. But usually I judge art in a very subjective way as in you will never be able to see a work the way the artist truly saw it when he made it even if you do a ridiculous amount of study on the subject, you could get a good idea but you wouldn't really know quite how these images came to his mind.

And so I think judging art is all about how you interpret it instead of trying to study it as much as possible to understand what the artist's point of view was, unless it's your academic field of interest. I don't feel like you need to go to art school to validate your opinions about everything.

Not saying you shouldn't get information about the things you are interested in when they can give you more insight about it.

It would be pretty stupid for example if someone were to write off a painting and not even know what movement the artist was from and what period it was made.

Overall I find terms like "art" and "kitsch" to be pretty useless and everything is how you percieve it.

Sorry I'm going off topic here. I simply think great art is great art, it doesn't have to have a "message". And while I won't deny that stuff like conceptual art is art, because the aesthetics aren't valued it doesn't appeal to me and it's not because I refuse to think about things, I think about real life issues all the time. It's just that conceptual pieces that I've seen usually try to make some kind of point that is so simple and obvious that I actually find it condscending.

Like you can take a chair, a picture of a chair and a dictionary definition of chair and group these things together, call it "one and three chairs" and exhibit it in an art gallery, and it IS art, but I don't have to like it, or be impressed by wordplay that a 5 year old could come up with.

Self referential art (or art for art's sake) was great when Duchamp did it because it was groundbreaking at that time but now it's such a stupid overused gimmick. "Look I know what art is, see how witty I am". Like people are getting too lazy to make actual art so they would rather just make pieces that preach to you about what art is.

I think that you do make certain distinctions, but you just don't recognize it. I doubt that you try to interpret the nearest stop sign as if it were art, though photography has made it more likely that you may do so. In order for anything to be defined as art, there must be a definition of art, which means that there is a limit to what is art and what is not. That stop sign can be considered art when you look at it from a certain angle with a certain intention, but when you are driving down the road looking at street signs, and look at the stop sign, you do not observe it as art.

The thing is, what are you appreciating in the art and why is it that you appreciate such a thing. You may not consciously realize that it is your brain that strives for order that appreciates some sort of formation or color scheme.

i believe in the world as love and art: love is the paradox of the self-sprung which is more than itself, and art are all its representations, which is the totality of everything we know. that's exactly why i think art has an ethical responsibility, because i think existence has an ethical responsibility to reflect its source, which is love.

I don't quite understand what you are saying. Are you saying that the privation of love does not exist? If it does exist, cannot art represent this privation by definition. Therefore, art would not have an ethical responsibility by virtue of what it is. If it did have a responsibility, it would be a responsibility that is imposed on it by something else.

love is all, all is love

The cool thing about art is everyone interprets it a different way.
The cool thing about artists: so do they.

I really don't like you.

but i looooove you

(and btw, you don't know me, but i know you)

Goddamnit, CA, this isn't poetry night. This is a conversation, yet you insist on speaking in code language. You, being pretty well-read in philosophy, should be all for communicating in a way that actually works. I am pretty sure I have seen you praise Wittgenstein somewhere.

He's kinda tied with Satchmo for most pretentious member of the forum.

I just wonder whether he has been stoned too much.

To be honest, I enjoy conversations with him more than I enjoy ones with the other members of the forum, specifically because of his knowledge. I definately disagree with him, and we are almost polar opposites, at least that is my observation.

I just don't see the need to spew unexplained poetry in this situation.

What...Tied?

I have no equal!

You've said this to about 5 of us lately. When will you readily admit the problem is you and go away.

i disappeared for a while and this became a good thread.

Sorry, I got frustrated. For the record, I've been sober for quite a while now, doesn't really feel like it though.

I'm just getting to that point where I feel like I can never really get my point across, and I should stop trying to talk about what can't be talked about (you'd think reading the Tao te Ching and Wittgenstein would have taught me that a while ago...)

I believe there is a point when rational analysis becomes empty, when we stop talking and learn to sing. That's why I started spouting poetry, but in the wrong context poetry can be cruelty. Again, my apologies. I care about you all and your beliefs and attitudes toward the world and I know you're all on your own paths and I shouldn't arrogantly try to push you in the direction I believe to be forward. Still, I crave human contact and intellectual stimulation and this is the best way I know to go about it. Oh, dilemmas...

And no, I don't believe in the privation of love. I've come to realize recently that everything deserves love, because everything has the potential for perfection and showing something love is the best way to guide it to that potential.

Okay, let me make sure I understand what you are saying.

Are you saying that there is no opposite of love? When I am talking about the privation of love and its existence, I am saying that there is an opposite to love, which is its absence. What I am interpreting your statement to mean is that you don't believe that love can be absent at all. If that is the case, then it is impossible to be unethical, (assuming that you said earlier that reflecting love is the ethical responsibility). If it is impossible, then can we really call it an ethical responsibility? Instead, we come back to what I was saying earlier, which is that you are using ethical responsibility as a synonym for necessity.

As far as the "using love to perfect" thing, I don't know your definition of perfection, though it seems that you see perfection as unity based on your posts. I don't see how loving inanimate objects would make them any more perfect though.

Inanimate objects are already perfect :P

I am a monist, so I believe that ultimately everything is One, and that this One-ness is best described as Love or Being, but because we live under the illusion of maya, we tend to understand these terms as they relate to their opposites, Hate or Non-Being. However, I think this is an imperfect understanding. But insofar as we have to operate under maya until we reach our final awakening, I think we have a responsibility to choose Love over Hate and Being over Non-Being. Under the illusion of maya, we see Love and Hate as locked in an eternal struggle that doesn't promise a resolution, and we see Being and Non-Being as trapped in an eternal cycle which we might call Becoming. When we are enlightened, we realize that Hate destroys itself, and therefore doesn't exist, and Non-Being... well... is Non-Being. Hate and Non-Being are the same in this sense because neither really exist... they're like feedback rolling off the pure power fifth that is Being, an ornament or decoration, but not something that exists in itself, and something that is always disappearing.

I'll try to tie these beliefs back in to what I was trying to get at with causality. I still hold that from the perspective of maya, which is characterized by discursive reasoning, which is based on duality (as computer science shows, all you need is 0 and 1 and some logic gates), causality seems to entail a contradiction. The reason for this is because causality both implies a first cause and precludes the possibility of a first cause. The reason it is impossible for there to be a first cause is because a cause only ever imparts the movement that has been imparted on it--billiard ball A makes billiard ball B move in a particular direction only because billiard ball A has been made to move in a certain direction by billiard ball C... and so on. Derrida talks about this a lot, but in annoyingly complicated terms. If you think about the Big Bang, and the idea that everything emerged from a singularity, you realize that that implies that the Universe began with One thing moving in Two directions... which is impossible. So you're stuck, I claim, with a tricky situation: causality seems to imply a contradiction, but this contradiction is only meaningful within the system of causality. Hence, I do not believe that discursive reasoning, which is dualistic, is inherently self-contradictory. Rather, I believe, in parallel with the previous paragraph, that within discursive reasoning we see, at its foundation, the constant cycling of identity and contradiction, the ultimate yin-yang, that of reasoning as such. But when we transcend discursive reasoning, identity and contradiction unify into paradox, which gives rise to Thought but is also beyond it.

And hence, to tie it all together, it may seem to be a contradiction that Hate both exists (qua illusion) and also doesn't exist... but it's actually a paradox! :D When Hate disappears we'll realize it was never there to begin with. :)

TS Elliot wrote a bit on this subject, try and Google it.

I really have nothing to say to this because this whole paragraph is claims. I really don't see how you start off accepting monism. My question would be how one can believe in such a thing.

I don't think everything can be called existence. Existence is a property and not an actual thing. We do refer to "the universe" as existence, but "existence" takes on the meaning of "everything that is."

How do contradiction and identity give rise to thought? What are you defining as thought? Thought only exists if there is an object to think about. If there is no object to think about, then there can be no thought. I take it that since "identity" does not exist, then you reject the idea that things exist. Existence is only possible as long as identity is possible. You cannot exist without existing as something.

I didn't start off believing monism, and I don't think anybody does. I could say it was "revealed" to me, I could say I experienced it, but these are all dualistic descriptions revolving around subject/object: I/transcendence. Even the description "I AM" falls short.

The notion that existence is a property, or predicate, has been widely disputed and is the subject of much philosophical debate. My view of the Universe is that complexity emerges from simplicity, and that this is why complex phenomena can be understood through Law, which restores their unity.

One way I could try to explain this is by setting up a duality between MIND and mind, where MIND could be interpreted as the Mind of God. MIND unfolds from simplicity to complexity, it is One in itself, it becomes witness to itself, becoming subject and object, it explodes into the limitless possibilities inherent in this division, becoming many subjects and many objects.

Mind, on the other hand, my mind or your mind, comes at the end of this process, after MIND has divided itself into many minds. A mind reverses this process, it takes the many minds (subjects) and unifies them through common beliefs, it takes the many objects and unifies them through Law. And so, mind folds back into MIND and the unity is restored.

How will thought define itself? Since thought understands Being through abstract concepts, ultimately thought will call Being itself a thought-form, since this is what it strives to reduce Being to (namely, itself). This is why I have given another name for Being, namely MIND. But MIND is simply Being as approached through thought. If I claim there is something besides thought, I can't define it through thought. But for simplicity's sake I could just go ahead and call it Body.

Along this line of reasoning, Body is simply that which resists mind. Mind is free to think of whatever it wants, whether it be consistent or self-contradictory. However, Body imposes limits and restraints on mind.

So Being divides itself into subject and object, mind and body. The mind responds to the needs of the body, and the body is subject to interpretation and definition by the mind.

When I claim that there is a unity that is "above" or "beyond," or "under" and "within," this duality of mind/body, when I attempt to define it rationally, with my mind, I betray it by choosing one side of the duality over the other (namely, mind over body). Hence, I call it MIND, and can represent it as a Force that has no restraints--it thinks everything it can think into existence, and this is its existence, it exists through its Thoughts which participate in its existence.

If I take the opposite route, and choose body over mind, I will have a much harder time of defining it. I would represent it as that which cannot be represented, not a Force, but a Limit. Not that which has no constraints, but that which is constraint itself, with nothing to constrain. And, if you think about it, this is Being, which cannot be defined except in terms of itself, which adds no information to its object except that it is, a pure constraint. Being, taken by itself, without any object to apply it to, is Body in its purest form, when we realize that any abstraction we use to label Body is still part of mind, and hence misses the mark.

Because the Unity manifests as Duality, choosing one side of the Duality over the other necessarily misses the Unity, but we can still find the Unity when we realize that these extremes coincide--that absolute constraint is absolute freedom, and that this is paradox.

Identity and contradiction do not give rise to thought, MIND or Being gives rise to thought. Thought is an expression of the self-division of MIND or Being, because it has a subject (mind) which is identical to itself, and contradictory to its object. And yet, despite the inherent difference between the subject and object, the subject can understand the object, which implies their underlying unity.

However, the subject cannot understand this unity itself, because it transcends the duality implicit in understanding. The unity resides on a higher level of experience, from which mind and body emanate. Mind and body have to be reconciled as a unity for this level to be reached, mind cannot get there on its own.