Aestheticization of violence  

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"One ought to learn anew about cruelty," said Nietzsche (Beyond Good and Evil, 229), "and open one's eyes. Almost everything that we call 'higher culture' is based upon the spiritualizing and intensifying of cruelty...."

The aestheticization of violence in high culture art or mass media is the depiction of violence in a manner that is “stylistically excessive in a significant and sustained way” so that audience members are able to connect references from the "play of images and signs” to artworks, genre conventions, cultural symbols, or concepts.

According to Nietzsche every human action is born of a basic instinct to exercise one's own power in some way. Gift-giving, love, praise, or harmful acts such as physical violence, carrying tales, etc. all stem from the same unconscious motive: to exert the will. The theory of the will to power is not limited to the psychology of human beings. Instead, it is the essential nature of the living universe, manifest in all things. Growth, survival, dominance in business or physical competition, all are seen as elements of this will. See will to power.

Contents

History in art

Antiquity

Plato proposed to ban poets from his ideal republic because he feared that their aesthetic ability to construct attractive narratives about immoral behaviour would corrupt young minds. Plato’s writings refer to poetry as a kind of rhetoric, whose "...influence is pervasive and often harmful." Plato believed that poetry that was "unregulated by philosophy is a danger to soul and community." He warned that tragic poetry can produce "a disordered psychic regime or constitution" by inducing "a dream-like, uncritical state in which we lose ourselves in ...sorrow, grief, anger, [and] resentment.

As such, Plato was in effect arguing that "What goes on in the theater, in your home, in your fantasy life, are connected" to what you do in real life.

Aristotle, though, advocated a useful role for music, drama, and tragedy: a way for people to purge their negative emotions. Aristotle mentions catharsis at the end of his Politics , where he notes that after people listen to music that elicits pity and fear, they "are liable to become possessed" by these negative emotions. However, afterwards, Aristotle points out that these people return to "a normal condition as if they had been medically treated and undergone a purge [catharsis]...All experience a certain purge [catharsis] and pleasant relief. In the same manner cathartic melodies give innocent joy to men" (from Politics VIII:7; 1341b 35-1342a 8).

1400s-1600s

The artist Hieronymus Bosch, from the fifteenth and sixteenth century, used images of demons, half-human animals and machines to evoke fear and confusion to portray the evil of man. The sixteenth-century artist Pieter Brueghel the Elder depicted nightmarish imagery that reflect, if in an extreme fashion, popular dread of the Apocalypse and Hell.

Mathis Gothart-Neithart, a German artist known as "Gruenewald" (1480-1528) depicted "intense emotion, especially painful emotion." His painting of the Crucifixion does not spare the beholder. Gruenewald relentlessly brings out all the marks of terrible suffering and agony, induced by the cruelty and torture of the executioners...[vividly conveying] a sense of horror and pain.

Gruenewald’s ‘Isenheim Altarpiece’ also shows a violent image of Jesus on the cross, with his body covered in wounds, with the focus on Jesus’s suffering and his death.

1700s-present

In the mid-18th century, Giovanni Battista Piranesi, an Italian etcher, archaeologist and architect active from 1740, did imaginary etchings of prisons that depicted people stretched on racks or trapped like rats in maze-like dungeons, an aestheticization of violence and suffering.

In 1849, as revolutions raged in European streets and authorities were putting down protests and consolidating state powers, composer Richard Wagner wrote that "I have an enormous desire to practice a little artistic terrorism."

Laurent Tailhade is reputed to have stated, after Auguste Vaillant bombed the Chamber of Deputies in 1893: "Qu'importent les victimes, si le geste est beau? [What do the victims matter, so long as the gesture is beautiful]." In 1929 André Breton's Second Manifesto of Surrealism stated that "L’acte surréaliste le plus simple consiste, revolvers aux poings, à descendre dans la rue et à tirer au hasard, tant qu’on peut, dans la foule" [The simplest Surrealist act consists of running down into the street, pistols in hand, and firing blindly, as fast as you can pull the trigger, into the crowd]." The German avant-garde composer Karlheinz Stockhausen echoed Tailhade and Breton when he called the terrorist attacks of September 11th the "greatest piece of art there has ever been".

See also




Unless indicated otherwise, the text in this article is either based on Wikipedia article "Aestheticization of violence" or another language Wikipedia page thereof used under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License; or on research by Jahsonic and friends. See Art and Popular Culture's copyright notice.

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