"Some souls must be sacrificed in the making of art and to the artist who makes it."
Do I believe that? I might if I believed there was such a thing as "art." But I do believe in creativity--or I think I do. Maybe. Ingenuity? Some sort of impulse?
Ego?
I started thinking about this because of an article a friend sent me a couple days ago (link). I felt it might be a provocation, and I landed on this statement concerning Brooke Shield's Calvin Klein ad:
“The marketing’s reception underscored the public’s capacity for moral outrage while also proving that sex sells: Even as networks pulled the ads, demand for the jeans skyrocketed.”
And so I sent that back with the following statement:
"Everything, it often seems, is a battle between sensuality and ideology. As a self-proclaimed iconoclast, I can fall on either side of the fence. . . but most often. . . 😈 "
Moral outrage is a form of insanity, I believe, and is incredibly dangerous.
"When the American actress Brooke Shields was 15, her appearance in a 1980 Calvin Klein Jeans campaign brought the controversy already swirling around her — about the sexualization of minors in the media, largely on account of her starring role, at age 12, as a child coerced into prostitution in Louis Malle’s 1978 film, “Pretty Baby” — to a fever pitch."
As Lou Reed might say, "those were different times." Have you seen the movie in its original form? Oh, my! Did you see Zeffirelli's "Romeo and Juliet", 1968?
Remember this? Or even worse, the old Abercrombie and Fitch catalogs?
Well, thank god we have moved on.
Oh, shit. . . wait a minute.
“You want to know what comes between me and my Calvins? Nothing.”
So yea. . . we put them in underwear. Now something does. Not the Mormon sort, but better than nothing.
Some would have it that art should be polemic in the service of an ideology "for good." I want it all. I want more than what there is. I want to see anything taboo. I want to see the things that piss people off. I may not like it, and I may squint and only look for a millisecond, but. . . I would not ban it. Not even bad porn. Hell, I don't like watching porn at all, but those 8mm films from the '50s are really something else. And "back in the day," Jim Linderman's "Dull Tool Dim Bulb" blog with its collection of erotic postcards made schmaltz interesting.
But as I wrote, I could come down on either side of things. Art and literature are not for everyone.
Speaking of which, I have been reading more of "The Book of Disquiet." I like it more now that I am deeper into it. It is not a book of beautiful prose; rather, it is a book of ideas. He says the same thing many times over but with subtle differences. I'm determined to finish the book now. I am at times inspired by and other times argumentative with what he puts forth, but either way, my brain is working which it hasn't for quite some time. I'll have more to say about that, I am certain.
One thing that confuses me is when critics use the word "sexual" in talking about an image, words like "hypersexualized," etc. I don't think an image can be sexual. It might be sensual, but that is a different thing. It confuses me as much as the subject/object distinction. Who is the subject when one is looking at a picture? What is the object? I've struggled to understand this since reading Bergson and others. I get that some want to go beyond the image and talk about it's production whether in Marxist terms or other, but there is a great deal of uncertainty there. Or so it seems to me.
I'm probably naive or worse, wrong. I read an article in the Times this morning about the terrible amount of waste and pollution that goes into making fashion clothing. If fashion is art, we can look beyond the art to its production. There is a physical accountability.
I'll need to give this much more thought. I'm tripping over my own thoughts now. That's what I get for talking out loud. But I'll let you all discuss this amongst yourselves for now. We can take this up later at the cafe over coffee and cigarettes and absinthe.
I'll bring the dueling pistols just in case.
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