In school they make you read a lot of classics, and somehow most of them are painful to get through. I remember wondering if maybe some of those books were only classics because teachers kept making their students read them, and some of those students became teachers who did the same just out of tradition. Ostensibly, art becomes classic when it resonates with a lot of people over a long time, and I guess I can accept that, but it’s the “resonate” part that I find a bit questionable. Specifically, I think a lot of people connect with a piece of art because it evokes a strong response, without necessarily passing judgment on the quality of the response.
Before go into that, I should clarify that I do see value in classic stuff, even if it’s hard to get through sometimes. Take The Lord of the Rings and Super Mario Bros., for example. For someone who’s familiar with more recent works that derived from those classics, the originals probably seem tedious. But if you know the originals, you can appreciate the more recent stuff more, because you understand where they came from. Also, when you consider the fact that the originals didn’t have a familiar base to stand on, their strengths become more impressive. The same goes for music, literature, painting, architecture, etc.
But it’s still fair to pass judgment on the classics. Here’s an analogy that’s not very flattering, but I think it makes the point pretty well. Consider dogs. They like to sniff things. All sorts of things. It seems like the more something stinks, the more excited a dog is to smell it. It’s not that they are looking for things that stink necessarily; rather, they explore their world through smell, and anything that has a strong smell is stimulating. So they go sniff it. And it just so happens that some of the strongest-smelling stuff in the world has a lot of germs on it, so people’s noses find it offensive.
Now think about some classical literature or artwork. I’d bet that the first few things that pop into your head will have a strong memory with them. Maybe it’s a fond memory, and maybe not. But when I look back at a lot of the art I’ve been exposed to that has achieved classical status, I’m pretty sure that it got that way because it was stimulating to someone. And not all of that stimulation was positive, or even morally acceptable. Sort of a “natural man” thing.
Let’s consider the visual arts in particular. I took an art history class in college. I barely passed – I think it was the lowest grade I ever got. It was definitely interesting. But there sure was a lot of inappropriate stuff thrown in there. Anyone who looks at very much classical art has to ask this question: Why in the world did they leave clothing off of so many people? The common explanation that I hear is that people back then looked at things differently; it was just an artistic expression, and people didn’t see it as pornographic. And evidently art lovers today do the same thing. But people back then had hormones too, so I have a hard time believing that claim. Actually I tend to think that the images and sculptures of unclad people were in fact intended to be pornographic, both by the artists and by the people who commissioned them. Remember that back then, they didn’t have photographs, and not many people knew how to draw realistically. So the morally depraved people who wanted inappropriate artwork could only get it by paying a professional painter or sculptor. And the only people rich enough to do that were royalty and religious leaders. So why would they put this artwork in churches and streets? Well, they wanted people to come and admire the artwork, and probably develop an attachment to the church or city associated with it. Most people wouldn’t distinguish between liking something for artistic reasons or for other reasons – they’d have an overall reaction to it.
So, does that mean that it’s immoral to look at Renaissance artwork? Not necessarily, but maybe. I think you have to define pornography based on its intent and its effect. (For example, an anatomy textbook could be pornography to someone who uses it that way.) Whether or not the artwork from back then was intended to turn people on, the more important question is what effect it has on people now who look at it. On the other hand, if you get used to seeing stuff like that to the point that it doesn’t have an effect on you, the state of being desensitized could itself be a problem.
If, hypothetically, people are reading this, then some of them are thinking something like “But most of that clothing-limited artwork has a religious theme, and it was created with a level of skill that could be considered inspired. It can’t be immoral if the content is uplifting, can it?” That brings up the familiar situation you see in movies and books today in which the whole thing is really good except for “that one part,” and the perpetual question: How immoral does one part have to be in order to make the whole thing immoral? Here’s a succinct answer to that [link], but it’s not really as simple as it seems, because if you really want to avoid inappropriate stuff, you’d kind of have to go live on the moon, and then you’d have to be careful of solar flares.
But back to the matter of inappropriate content wrapped in good art. I maintain that bad things wrapped in appealing packages are more dangerous than bad things labeled as such. A bottle of poison locked in a trunk in some cellar is not nearly as dangerous as a drop of poison dissolved in a drink. In the same way, most people aren’t going to go seek out trashy movies, but if you put a trashy scene in a funny, exciting movie, then people who wouldn’t seek it out will see that scene anyway. And the same goes with paintings and sculptures. The fact that a piece of pornography is created with skill simply makes it more dangerous, because it makes it more likely to be viewed. And the same goes for the literature they make us read in school.
So I’m not trying to pass judgment on people for liking classical artwork, but I do think the creators had less-than-honorable intentions in mind when they created it. And let’s face it – you’d be pretty uncomfortable if you saw your son’s bedroom decorated with the stuff.
