Daisy Dixon on Depraved Art

Defining depraved art

0:00This is Philosophy Bites with me, David Edmonds, and me, Nigel Warburton. Philosophy Bites is available at www.philosophybites.com. Does art have any relationship to morality? Can a work of art be immoral? And if so, how? Philosopher Daisy Dixon is the author of Depraved, the story of dangerous art. Daisy Dixon, welcome to Philosophy Bites. Hi, Nigel. Thanks for having me. The topic we're going to focus on is depraved art. What's that?

0:33Well, it's an artwork that relates to immorality in some way, and it can do that in at least five ways. First, it might simply depict something immoral. I'm particularly interested in obscenity for that reason. Secondly, it might somehow cause someone to do something terrible, like commit a crime because of a result of consuming it. Third, it might have been made by someone with an immoral character, and the question there is how does that moral character affect the art object. Fourth, where the

1:06artwork has an immoral perspective, and this is something aestheticians and philosophers of art have been looking at for a long time. I'm interested in how those artworks might oppress whole social groups through their perspective. And lastly, simply when the artwork's been created in an unethical way, particularly with contemporary art, maybe it's involved killing or harming animals in the process or harming the planet. That's super clear, but I'm still not 100% sure what depraved means in this context. Yes. So even though an artwork might relate to immorality, and when I say depraved,

1:42I mean kind of particularly egregious immorality, it might relate to an immoral situation through those five ways, but whether or not the art object actually embodies that property is another question. So for instance, if an artwork depicts something terrible, it may well have a morally good perspective because it's inviting the viewer to adopt the right attitude towards what's being shown. I was more thinking of, for instance, some people in history have thought homosexuality was immoral. It was illegal in Oscar Wilde's time. So depicting acts of homosexuality or homosexual relations would

2:20have been considered immoral, probably by a majority in Victorian England. But it's highly contentious to say that's depraved art. That's a great point. And I think what's curious about when we talk about depraved art, we have to consider when and where we are in the world. In the UK, there was a case of Radcliffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness in 1928 that was banned by UK courts. It wasn't even sexually explicit, the novel, but it depicted a lesbian couple during the First World War. And that was enough for

2:52it to be banned. And indeed, many commentators at the time described it as obscene. One commentator said he'd rather give a child a vial of acid rather than read that novel. We do need to bear in mind, though, if we want to adopt a kind of objectivity about morality, it certainly is not the case that homosexuality and queerness is immoral. People's beliefs about what's right and wrong change over time. But that doesn't undermine the fact that there's going to be a moral fact of the matter as

3:24to whether or not it's right or wrong. So today, whilst even in the 1990s, and indeed, in some parts of Africa, where some African countries where homosexuality is still illegal, if you have an artist depicting homosexual relations, then that would be considered depraved. But I think they're mistaken about that judgment. So sometimes people can make mistaken moral judgments

Depiction and moral judgment

3:48about artworks. While we're on the topic of depiction, you might think that even in Victorian times, heterosexual physical relations between human beings were considered not just acceptable, but actually morally good within marriage. And yet you wouldn't depict sexual acts. So something which is considered moral might not be considered suitable for a picture. Yeah, that's a great point. And I think with pictures and depending on how they're made as well. So often a classic case of this was the heroic rape imagery tradition, which was particularly in

4:24Renaissance Italy. And a lot of these paintings were very sexual, but they wouldn't depict actual acts of intercourse. And that's partly to do with the kind of explicitness, there's something about a picture, or even a novel, if a novel is inviting us to imagine sexual acts, that can be quite problematic. But then with a picture, especially the kind of Italian Renaissance paintings, they had a realism to them, there was a worry, depending on who was consuming them, that that would influence

4:55people's behaviour. So outside of marriage, I think is what they were worried about. And if you have artworks on show, eroticising and romanticising sexual relations, I think there was a fear, depending on where we were in the world, a fear that it might induce fornication, rather than accepted sex within

Causation and realism

5:13marriage.

Causation and realism

5:14That's your second category, in a sense, the category about causation. So an image that can cause people to become depraved is a depraved image, in some sense. And there have been many fears. I mean, in Britain, the censorship of male erections in for years in cinema was just that that was a justification that would somehow tend to corrupt people. So what a depraved image can do is cause you with or without your will, to do things that you wouldn't otherwise have done. That's the fear. Yeah, and this fear actually goes back into times of antiquity. And this is what Plato in particular was

5:48worried about. He was tapping into a widespread belief that artworks had a magical quality, that they could actually induce the viewer to feel the same or act the same. And this was in part because of the so-called realism about these acts on theatre. For instance, actors were so convincing in their self-indulgent expression of emotion that Plato was worried that seeing that regularly would induce viewers to start behaving the same way. And mainly it was because of the realism of it. So Alexander Nehemus, the philosopher,

6:22says it was because of this almost transparency of the acts on stage. And in some cases, in ancient Greek theatre, they'd actually show real sex acts on stage, they would bypass representation altogether. And there are other stories as well of people being pushed over the edge. There's a famous Roman myth where the Aphrodite of Nidos sculpture, which shows Aphrodite bathing and naked, apparently a man in the second century BCE saw the sculpture, let's just say had sex with it. Some people say sexually assaulted

6:56the statue, but he had sex with it because he thought it was so lifelike and beautiful, left a stain on it, and an out of shame threw himself off a cliff. But whilst these are sort of tales from antiquity, we might think they're quite distant now. But now we have the issue of video games. The realism has been pushed to such a point where the barrier between fiction and reality is becoming more and more porous. And especially with video games, there are actually studies that show that violent video games can actually mould our emotions and our attitudes towards people in the real world.

7:29This was the fear with the Clockwork Orange movie as well, that was withheld for many years because it was felt to be potentially corrupting. I think that idea that images can cause people to act badly, it's there in the whole, in the biblical things about fear about idols as well, worshipping idols. You know, you can end up worshipping an idol if you have an idol, so you must destroy them. What about the perspective point?

Immoral perspectives

7:53How you can have a perspective that's depraved? Yeah, so this is where we're moving beyond just what an artwork shows us. The artwork, because of the way the subject matter has been expressed, either through text or through colour, form and composition or symbolism. In doing that, it actually is inviting us to adopt a particular attitude towards what's being shown. A case I often go back to as a good example of this is Titian's Rape of Europa, which the

8:25feminist philosopher Anne Eaton famously analysed in 2003 through a feminist sort of philosophical lens. What it shows is Zeus, who's disguised as a bull, has come down to earth, he's abducting Princess Europa. It's taken from Ovid's Metamorphoses, and Titian interpreted it in a way that romanticised and eroticised that abduction and later sexual intercourse. She's very much being dragged away against her will, and many people interpret the consent here to be ambiguous in the painting. And the fact that we

8:56know Titian wrote in his own letters to King Philip II of Spain, who was the one who commissioned the painting, one of six, that the painting was to have erotic appeal for the male viewer. So there we have an act that's being shown to us, but we're being invited, or certain audiences are being invited to enjoy and be aroused by the sexual violence. So this implied viewer is a common feature in painting. I was thinking, as you were saying that, of Balthouse, the painter who paints often

9:30pre-adolescent girls in poses which look very sexualised, and invite the viewer to look at them like they're looking up their skirts, basically, quite often. The question then is, is the painter endorsing the implied view, or just showing you a perspective? Yeah, that's a really good point. I think this is where philosophical analysis can be really helpful to interpret complicated artworks, where depending on the artist's own mindset, we can often detect a particular moral perspective. So for instance, with Lini Reifenstahl, we know because of her

10:04relationship with Hitler, what her political and moral beliefs were. So the fact that her Triumph of the Will film is very form, glamorises and celebrates the Nazi regime, but the fact that she had that intention means that we know that was her perspective. But there are cases when, for instance, Nabokov's Lolita, where it's a complicated novel about the paedophile Humbert Humbert. But the perspective there in the work is complicated. Some philosophers think it's an immoral work of art. But Nabokov himself complained when it was trying to be censored. He thought people

10:40judging it to be immoral was a massive mistake, and he got very annoyed about it. And I think that's because he was trying to present and seduce the viewer into an immoral state of mind. But that was the point of the novel. He knew it to be immoral, and he himself wasn't necessarily endorsing that perspective. This relates to the next category, actually, the category of the artist. And

The artist and the work

11:01there is a view of the work of art that it's sort of independent. The umbilical cord is cut once you've produced it, and it's left for other people to interpret. But I guess from what you've been saying, you think that facts about the artist, facts about how the thing has been produced, its historical context, and so on, what it meant when it was produced are relevant to interpretation. Yeah, so I don't think we can separate the art from the artist. I like that image of the umbilical cord. I don't think we can cut that. I think that's because I generally adopt a contextualist

11:34viewpoint for the philosophy of art. I generally don't think the death of the author works. This isn't to say, though, that by taking the artist to be relevant to the artwork's identity, when and where it was made, it's not exhausted by the artist's intentions, but their very identity, where they, a woman, for example, I think, is going to determine the properties in that artwork. However, that's not going to exhaust what the artwork can mean. My position is a kind of have-your-cake-and-eat contextualism, where the viewer can still have agency, they can ascribe

12:09some kind of meaning to it. But I think we can't abandon, say, the time and place that the artwork was made to understand its many meanings, but we shouldn't abandon that original context. The artwork might acquire new meanings over time. So again, we can kind of be a so-called originalist. We think the original context of the artist is important to understand the artwork. In that case, I'm a big fan of Arthur Danto's red canvas thought experiment. I'm very convinced by that. The art critic Danto invites us to imagine a museum where there's at least five

12:44identical red canvases on the wall. It describes each one, and whilst they all look exactly the same, just having different titles and different kind of creative processes behind them. One of them is just an unfinished canvas, isn't even an artwork. Another one is like a minimalist square. Another is by a follower of Matisse, who's like trying to just like derivatively copy a Matisse. And another one is about the Red Sea, where it's just the sea, right? So something can look exactly the same,

13:15but because of the creative process behind it, when and where it was made and the intention can actually change or rather determine the properties that the artwork has. So in that case, I think you can't separate the art from the artist in that way. So what does that mean in terms of depravity? Because many artists are bohemian at least, and some pretty depraved. Does that mean it inevitably permeates their art? Yes. So there are going to be different ways that that moral character permeates through the

13:48art object. Sometimes we have what I call easy cases, where the artist has painted, for instance, a young girl that he abused. So Gauguin's Child Brides are a classic case of this. He painted them in a way that kind of celebrated them. He found beauty in them, but he was also eroticising the abuse. He himself wrote in his diaries what he thought about Tahitian girls. He said that deep down they desired rape and that they were animal, I quote, animal-like. So his views about these girls were

14:21quite clear. And in his paintings, we can detect those attitudes, again, going back to that perspective relation. We can see the way he painted them as nudes, the way they were looking at the viewer. That is an easy case because the artist has embedded their moral attitude into their very artwork. However, there are more complicated cases where it's more in their style of art making. So Hitler's paintings, for instance, are very peaceful. A lot of people have thought that they were anodyne and innocuous. But actually his

14:53paintings, his watercolours, and there are hundreds of them, are mainly of Austrian Germanic landscapes, castles, flowers, lakes and mountains. And what these artworks are doing, when you actually look at Hitler's own artistic taste, he thought art should be representational, should be idealistic and realistic. That's why he denounced so-called degenerate art, because it was abstract, non-representational. It distorted the bodily form, which completely run against his Aryan myth-making, which is what his

15:25paintings are actually showing. It's a nostalgic vision of this sort of Aryan utopia that he was envisioning. And that is in his artwork. You just have to look a bit more carefully for it. What about some imaginary abstract expressionist who paints a few stripes on the canvas and leads an absolutely depraved existence? What would you say about that? I'd call that a hard case. And I think in that case, the artistic properties of the artwork are not

15:55determined by the moral character. We need to be careful that we don't slip into an extreme intentionism, where the artwork just means whatever the artist intended it to mean, or indeed us shoving immoral character into any old few stripes on a canvas. So in those cases, I still don't think we can separate the artwork from the artist. But when I say artwork, I mean art object. So the artifact was still created by a human with a certain beliefs and with a certain behavior. And the fact that they themselves have crafted that artifact, that's the only way that the artist's life is connected, or the

16:31artist's identity is connected to the artwork. But the artwork's properties, what it's about, its meaning, its aesthetic properties, I don't think would be determined by the artist. But the reason I say I want to hold on to a little bit of a connection there, it's just to explain really people's reactions. They might feel disgust. I don't want to have that object in my house. I don't want Rolf Harris's paintings in my house. Because they're his creations. You might say it's irrational. But it's one that many people have explains their behavior around it, they don't want to go near it, they don't want to look at it. And I think

17:05that's just simply because it's the product of a hand of a monster. Perhaps you should just say who Rolf Harris was and what he did. Yes, so Rolf Harris was an Australian entertainer. I think he really came to fame in the 1960s. But he was still on TV when I was a kid. And he was also a painter. And he would often paint on TV. But at various points in his life, he committed sex acts against children.

Unethical production and censorship

17:29So let's look at your last category. You talk about production. So in a sense, this is the easiest category. There's two ways of painting a crucifixion, or many more probably. But you can get a model to pose on a crucifix for a few hours, or you could nail them to a cross and paint them. The second is clearly an immoral way of doing that. And that presumably is uncomplicated. Yeah, so there are going to be cases where, again, you might not even necessarily know that the artwork has those unethical properties. But here I follow Ted Nanachilli's philosophy,

18:01Australian philosopher. He thinks that if an artwork's very production, the way it's been created, has unethical qualities to it, then that is a property of the artwork. But again, depending on how that affects our perception of it is another thing. So for instance, if you're looking at a crucifixion painting, you don't know that the model has actually been seriously harmed in the creation of that. Finding that out, it's not that the artwork's changed. It's just that you've now detected an unethical property that it always had, even if you couldn't perceive it.

18:33In a sense, every crucifixion involved an actual crucifixion of Christ, though. So there is an immoral act behind all of it, all of them. That's a great point. That's really fascinating, actually. And I think the idea that that image, which has been repeated and repeated and repeated, and in so many different ways, like I love Grunwald's Eisenheim altarpiece. He was one of the first to really show Christ as almost human. He's in a lot of agony, his skin's grey, it's sagging, like the pain that comes across in that. And I think, yeah, in that sense, if the original act,

19:07perhaps, maybe there's something that unethical property is kind of reaching back through time, and I quite like that idea. Yeah. Well, I don't like it, but you know. But generally, if I have to harm an animal or a person, or an environment, possibly, in order to make my art, that in itself condemns it. Yes. And there are cases, particularly in contemporary art, where an artist has done something terrible, like Kim Jones, his rap piece in the 1970s. He set fire to rats in front

19:38of an audience, and they died an agonising death. They screamed, and then he screamed. And then that was kind of the performance. He was charged with animal cruelty. It incurred a small fine. I think the gallery director got fired. So there was a lot of outrage against it. But he said he was repeating an act that was often happening during the Vietnam War. So he himself had served a tour there. And many of the rats, when he was a soldier there, would plague them, they would eat their food, they wouldn't let them sleep. And he wanted to take that terrible event from a war and bring it to the artistic space.

20:15And you might think there's value to be found in that. It was sort of pushing on this idea of what the audience is like, when we're witnesses, sort of seemingly powerless to war crimes, and we're not doing anything to stop it. There was a lot of artistic political value in that artwork. But the question is, did we really need that terrible, unethical flaw or act to make that point? It might have made it all the more immersive and effective, like affective as well as an artistic work. It's just aesthetics of death right in front of us, that spectacle would have been incredibly emotional

20:51and effective in a way that not killing them might not have been. I guess it's a it's a consequentialist view, maybe of like how much value the artwork has, does that outweigh the harm that it's caused? The other thing as well, of course, is people respond differently to artworks that harm animals. So I eat meat, I used to be vegan, now I eat meat. I don't like that about myself. But for various reasons, I do. I don't think it's a good thing to do. And many people who would condemn artworks that kill animals will go home and have steak that night.

21:23One last question. We don't seem to judge artists who harm themselves in their art production in the same way. I'm thinking of Marina Abramovich, who actually invited people to harm her, basically. She went into a gallery and put all kinds of weapons on a table, hammers and knives and various other things and let people do what they like to her. I mean, that's a sort of invitation to harm yourself. And it's a sort of consensual invitation. Yeah. And I think with that piece, Rhythm Zero, where she invited people to do various things to her, some of them did harm her. Other people did

21:58just nice things around her. But I think there is a complicated piece because she was traumatised after that piece because someone loaded a gun and put it to her head and the performance had to stop. People also assaulted her. And I think they made her bleed as well. She's invited it. But how much control she has over it, certainly she wasn't responsible for the acts that happened in that work. Ultimately, the responsibility lies on the people who decided to do it. Because she didn't invite people to harm her. She invited them to use the various objects on the table. They kind of

22:32co-created the artwork with her there. Some people's reaction to all this would be say, well, look, if something's depraved in any of those senses, just ban it. Do you agree? No, I think we have to be very cautious about censorship for various reasons. Art throughout the world has been censored and suppressed for very bad reason, because it's silencing dissent to, for instance, political, indeed, most of the time, totalitarian regimes. Art is such an important voice for communities and for telling forgotten and marginalised stories. We also need to be careful

23:05relatedly because a lot of the art that has faced censorship in the past isn't actually immoral. It's just that it's subverted a conventional norm, like some of the queer art that we mentioned before. So we need to be careful that our moral system that's driving that censorship is a robust one. I think instead that if an artwork really is immoral, and that it's harming people in real life, the answer is more a kind of counter-speech. So this idea that we can make more art, to respond to it, and perhaps even disarm its toxicity.

23:36Daisy Dixon, thank you very much. Thanks very much for having me.

23:46For more Philosophy Bites, go to www.philosophybites.com. You can also find details there of Philosophy Bites books and how to support us.