by JL Wall

At first I wasn’t quite sure what Rod Dreher was aiming to do by calling out Eminem because a man thought he was quoting him while committing murder, but after several days, the discussion has led him into a key point about the role of art in modern culture:

No serious person believes that art should be devoid of sex and violence, because sex and violence are part of life. It all comes down to how an artist handles those things, and the context in which the art is created. We live now in a culture in which artists and those who promote them refuse any moral responsibility for their work, and tell themselves that they are operating from a position of ethical superiority.

The fact is, art is never created in a vacuum.

Which reminded me, almost instantly, of Bringhurst on the same subject:

And what of the typographer Peter Schoffer, who in 1463 was asked to typeset and print a pamphlet urging all good Germans and Christians - not just skinheads - to massacre the Turks? Schoffer too took refuge in the craft. He set the pamphlet handsomely, with a particularly handsome first leaf: four lines of large textura and a lot of white space. The result is still much prized. It is Europe’s earliest known title page.

[...]

Morality is part of language itself, and language is part of morality. Not all sentences are good to speak on all occassions even though the language can construct them. And not all things the designer can design are desirable just because he can design them. I think this truth applies, in its small way, even to Peter Schoffer’s title page - though in Schoffer’s case the witnesses are dead, the statute of limitations has long run out, and the page is inarguably beautiful.  (Robert Bringhurst, “Boats Is Saintlier Than Captains,” Everywhere Being Is Dancing, pp. 197-9)

The matter of wondering where the limit should be drawn is nothing new, and it is not new that the question should often appear either unanswerable or the answer utterly arbitrary. Denying that there is a limit at all, however, is frequently more dangerous than misplacing it. Art for art’s sake along will not suffice, though the piece may still be beautiful. Art is like anything else - it must exist in the real world, our world: in Wendell Berry’s construction, “its real habitat is the household and the community.”

Joyce’s Ulysses and Pound’s Cantos may not be common in the life of most households. But they are a part of my life and mind - exist, that is, in “my household” (though at 21 and in college, there isn’t much of one) - and so long as I exist as a part of a community, they are a part of the lives of those communities of which I am also. Art must be consumed by the living, and so must enter life. The only way it can truly be for its own sake is for no human eye to ever behold the finished piece - for it not to be art.

So there are beautiful things in the world that probably ought not to have been made - though that does not affect the fact that they are, especially once they are granted enough distance from the moment of their creation, beautiful nevertheless. Morality and craft cannot be separated. “Deed is belief.” (I associate the thought with Will Herberg, though I can’t find it, and I doubt he said it so succinctly.) I’m hardly trying to imply that the Beatles are responsible for the Manson Family murders, but Rod has a point: art (and “art”) exists in the world, and its creators have the obligation to recognize that it will have consequences, for good or for ill - and that they will not be able to foresee all of those consequences. The artist who would cut himself off from the morality of his work is the artist who would cut himself off wholly from the world, from being. But that’s something which we simply can’t do. By being, we are in the world — a world in which morality, if one is to acknowledge its existence, permeates life, which consists of deeds that can therefore not escape the question of morality — and because we are in the world, to shirk the matter of morality is to shirk responsibility.

Filed under: media/culture, morality