but there is no destruction without violence — gadzooks

This statement is not true.

What do you mean?

What do you mean? — gadzooks

There are plenty of examples of destruction without violence, violence without destruction. One word does not imply the other.

Could you point some of these out to me? I appreciate your feedback, my statement was not to be taken as entirely true nor false, I'm simply prying & prodding.

"You suck."
Verbal violence, no destruction.

Planned demolishion of a compromised building. Destruction, no violence.

I see what you mean, you would consider verbal violence though? It does not align with the act itself, so how could verbal violence be considered proper violence? You commit the act of speaking, and these words are detached, they have no action. Speaking, saying "You suck." I'm not sure could be exactly categorized as violence. If someone had said to you those words, it could pain someone, but not be a violent act.

You would do well to distinguish between the art that portrays violence, and the art that contrives violence.

For example, Nero contrived a violent spectacle that was later portrayed thusly: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nero%27s_Torches

Painting and burning people alive have very different aesthetics. Which is your main interest?

Some people admire bullfighting as an art form, some serial killers include ritual mutilation of their victims and I've heard of the artistry of a very effective inquisitor. But having been forced to watch "the physicality" of hockey games so anticipated by their fans and boxing matches, I conclude that no matter how artfully violence is employed, I can't regard it as art.

Since we're posting videos.



Somewhere in the above video there's a brief synopsis along the lines of "Art is beauty. Beauty takes many forms beyond the stereotypical and expected ie. a flower or a warm summer's day. The greats before us knew this world was full of horror and tragedy, and so as artists wished to redeem these misfortunes and give solace in that which is detestable through beautification, one of the founding concepts of art." Something like that. It's explained much better in the video. Worth the watch, if you have the time and interest in the subject.

"Art is beauty. Beauty takes many forms beyond the stereotypical and expected ie. a flower or a warm summer's day. — Outlander

For a different view of art:

Art critic Sister Wendy Beckett once said that before Picasso, painters took it for granted that their job was to produce works of beauty. What else is art to do, after all? It was only after Picasso—specifically, after 1907's “Les Demoiselles d'Avignon,” with its squatting French prostitutes with faces like grotesque African masks—that painters realized they were not bound to beauty, that beauty was not a fate but, in a way, a limitation. Picasso showed that ugliness too could be the subject of great art, that artists could capture ugliness without rendering it beautiful, and this forever changed the course of culture. Like all truly deep assumptions, this one about beauty had hardly seemed like an assumption at all. It had seemed rather like an unquestionable, inescapable truth—until someone questioned it and thereby escaped it. What had seemed self-evident came to be seen as a self-imposed restriction. How much of the world, how much ugliness, how much mundanity had artists been ignoring? How much more could they now capture? This was perhaps the question of twentieth century art, with its depictions of hideous slaughter, its sliced-up cow carcasses, its snow shovels and urinals and soup cans, paint splotches and blank canvases.
(Lee Braver)

Depending on your definition of art, anything can be an art form - if you believe that doing it well is an art.

Serial killers artistic savants? Boxing? MMA? Cruelty? Depravity? Taking it to the level of an art. Mass genocide? Mass extinction? I guess it ends when there is nobody left to appreciate it as a valid thought exercise, which probably defines at least some sort of limit.

Anything can be an art - for psychopaths and for nerdy guitar players like me haha

Destruction is purely physical, whereas violence is physical plus psychological.
Therefore attributing violence to the natural disasters sounds absurd.
Violence can only be attributed to the agents with psychological motives and sufferings.
Violence can happen without physical destruction e.g. in mental level.

I don't see any possible relevance or link between art and violence.
Likewise, I can't see any link between art and destruction. They are not relevant in any shape of forms.

I feel that violence is inherently loaded with intent, so I don't see any way you could plausibly liken natural disasters (sporadic, physical events not dictated by a consciousness) to interpersonal violence. It's think we have all, at some point, accidentally injured, however minorly, a friend or family member whilst excited, or preoccupied, or perhaps just not aware of their presence when turning a corner or opening a door, etc.

Is this a violent act or mere unfortunate happenstance?

Conflating physical destruction with violence wholly is a little nonsensical, because in reality, they only really solidly and consistently overlap in very human environments. I suppose it depends on how you really define 'destruction', but in most other animals, I'd argue the extent to which they 'destroy' in order to enact 'violence' is minimal, or better yet, strategically minimised. That is, animals that kill others tend to aim to do so as efficiently as possible; jaguars incise the skull, lions incise the jugular, owls decapitate. Hunters do not use machine-guns or C-4 to kill deers because they aren't aiming to 'destroy'.

So I think there is a line to be drawn there between violence and obliquely destructive violence, and the two are not synonymous at all. Nor are they inherently synonymous with destruction itself. As is exemplified above, most violence that happens on earth is done in a way that the victim is preserved; there is a purpose, it is not indiscriminate. There has to be an element in nuance in how you treat violence and destruction in relation to one another.

You said that:

Innately, since at least two distinct beings have existed on our planet, there was some form of violence or discord — gadzooks

But that doesn't necessarily hold true. Can bacteria really be violent to one another? Again, there is no intent there. Is a rotting fruit being violently destroyed by fungi/bacteria?

Violence and destruction are neither mutually exclusive, nor mutually inclusive, so your question is flawed.

As for art: it isn't a question anyone else can answer for you. Do you consider it as art? What is art? I see where you're coming from on the beauty x brutality dyad, but I think that stems a lot more from human psychology than your physical environment. I trust the brutality you find beautiful is not meted out on houses, or lampposts, or motor vehicles, but on living things that want to resist it, or existing 'beautiful' things you enjoy seeing ruined.

Many philosophers have written on this very transgressive desire of people to see beautiful systems (including other people, unfortunately) destroyed. It could link back to your typical l'appel du vide or some variation of it. I suppose many people probably do consider destruction/violence art/beauty.

If you've got the stomach for it, and are still interested in the question, maybe try reading some transgressive lit to form a personal psychological basis for your views on violence and their artistic connotations: Bataille, de Sade, Ballard, even Anaïs Nin to some degree, though keep in mind, these are very macabre and intentionally disturbing.

Some people admire bullfighting as an art form, some serial killers include ritual mutilation of their victims and I've heard of the artistry of a very effective inquisitor. But having been forced to watch "the physicality" of hockey games so anticipated by their fans and boxing matches, I conclude that no matter how artfully violence is employed, I can't regard it as art. — Vera Mont

A clean left hook can be as admired as ballet by some. Ballet is art.

Art engenders a reaction, so can a brutal knockdown.

As someone said earlier, there is performance and an art in bullfighting.

As someone said earlier, there is performance and an art in bullfighting. — Malcolm Parry

Of course there is. You can admire explosions, executions, arson; you can call anything done with skill an art-form, if you want to. To me, art is creative, rather than destructive. That's the line I draw.

To me, art is creative, rather than destructive. That's the line I draw. — Vera Mont

Is Damien Hurst’s cow in formaldehyde art?
I assume the cow didn’t die of natural causes.

Is Damien Hurst’s cow in formaldehyde art? — Malcolm Parry

No more than the microscope slides, organs and bones I worked on in Pathology. The 'artist' didn't make a cow (These are art) ; he merely used her body to achieve yet another novelty. Those patients died, in some cases and their deaths were their own, not mine to use. We preserved parts of them for diagnosis, scientific study and teaching. We didn't make a public spectacle of them. While not violent, hurtful or destructive, this isn't art, either,.

that painters realized they were not bound to beauty, that beauty was not a fate but, in a way, a limitation. Picasso showed that ugliness too could be the subject of great art, that artists could capture ugliness without rendering it beautiful, and this forever changed the course of culture.

The idea that art does not have to be beautiful actually predates Picasso. Tolstoy spent an entire chapter of his work What is Art? https://www.gutenberg.org/files/64908/64908-h/64908-h.htm#chap02 - first published in English in 1898 - and you can read it for free on Gutenberg at the link - dispelling this notion.

For Tolstoy - art consisted in the connection between artist and the receiver of the art. The receiver must experience some emotion the artist felt in creating the art - and only then could it be considered art.

According to Tolstoy:

A real work of art destroys, in the consciousness of the receiver, the separation between himself and the artist...

If only the spectators or auditors are infected by the feelings which the author has felt, it is art.

To evoke in oneself a feeling one has once experienced, and having evoked it in oneself, then, by means of movements, lines, colors, sounds, or forms expressed in words, so to transmit that feeling that others may experience the same feeling — this is the activity of art.

Art is a human activity consisting in this, that one man consciously, by means of certain external signs, hands on to others feelings he has lived through, and that other people are infected by these feelings and also experience them.

No more than the microscope slides, organs and bones I worked on in Pathology. Those patients died, in some case and recovered in others. We preserved parts of them for diagnosis, scientific study and teaching. We didn't make a public spectacle of them. While not violent, hurtful or destructive, this isn't art, either,. — Vera Mont

Many people considered it art. I wasn’t a fan but I saw them in a very posh gallery in London.

Many people considered it art. — Malcolm Parry

That's not my problem. Some gullible folk will buy anything..

Bob Flanagan was certainly doing art, violently, no?

@gadzooks


Art, I would say, exists in a relationship between the subject and the social whereby the art emerges from a subjective affective / intuitive salience (personal expression of meaning) in combination with a social salience that includes the feelings it provokes in others (personal resonance of meaning) and its social situatedness (social reception and consequence). So, to break it down using your example: whether or not Damien Hurst's cow is art has nothing to do with whether you, I or Vera Mont like it or consider people who go to see it, gullible etc. It comes down to whether a) the experience of creating it was artistically salient for the artist b) the experience of viewing it is artistically salient for the viewer in a way that reflects the intentions of the artist (so far we're with Tolstoy on this) and c) where the art ends up socioculturally situated, what its social effects are.

It's the strength of this total triadic relationship that determines whether something is art. No individual opinion matters outside that. What matters is the emergent social reality, which is, by definition, not something that one person can meaningfully confirm or deny---it's just there or not or to a degree whether there is debate about it or not. The Mona Lisa's artistic strength in terms of this triadic view is beyond question. The relationships have been established beyond debate. Damien Hurst's cow is the subject of some debate, but, for me, it comes down to a relationship I haven't established with the work but other's clearly have, as well as the artist's intentions which are beyond my knowledge, and so I'll maintain a modest neutrality.

As for violence, the best art is that which ruptures the social sphere in a positive way. I'm thinking Picasso, the impressionists, etc. That's a kind of positive symbolic violence. As for the literal or symbolic depiction of violence in a supposed artwork itself, it's no different than any other depiction of anything else as it comes down again to that triadic relationship. What was the intention? How do people relate to that intention? And what, if any, is the social effect?

Essentially agree. What’s interesting to me is that people are forever trying to build fences around art - demarcating what counts as art and what does not, usually excluding works they find challenging, dreadful, or both. I generally hold that art is anything intentionally presented to provoke an aesthetic or reflective response. Whether you like it or not, or whether it’s “good,” remains a separate question, one that’s often confused with the more fundamental issue of what art is in the first place.

In the end, discussions about the value or appeal of a work should not be mistaken for conclusions about its status as art. The ontology of art - what makes something art - demands a different kind of attention than questions of taste or judgment. I personally avoid violent art work or themes, but that's entirely on me.

The question that has been prodding my mind in recent times is whether or whether not violence could be considered an art form? That not so much the act, but the nature itself of it, shares brutality & beauty. Innately, since at least two distinct beings have existed on our planet, there was some form of violence or discord. It is apart of not only our nature, but the nature of our world too. — gadzooks

You need to define violence. If it is merely one conscious being acting destructively against someone else, then there's no inherent art to violence than someone expressing love. In itself an expression of love is not art, but mere communication of a certain intent and emotion.

Art is when there's a form of universalization of communication, often through abstractions that pulls in a broader context and philosophy around something specific.

If violence is more general in its destructive nature, even childbirth becomes violence. The destruction of the human body to birth a new. A woman screaming in pain as she suffers violence done to herself or the unborn doing violence onto her; yet we portray childbirth as beauty in art.

The director Nicholas Winding Refn has made a career trying to use violence as part of his art. But I'm still thinking violence itself just becomes the means to tell something, rather than embodying the art itself. Violence itself becomes an aesthetic, a paint stroke of craft rather than the artwork itself. You cannot have violence as art, but violence is a part of the paintbrush just like love or compassion is not art, but part of the paintbrush.

Damien Hurst's cow is art has nothing to do with whether you, I or Vera Mont like it or consider people who go to see it, gullible etc — Baden

I 100% agree. I used it as something that I thought was of little merit but needed the slaughter of an animal to complete. I stopped replying because there was little point

:up: What strikes me is that there are certain presumptions built into saying this or that is or isn't art, which are easy to miss, and which often include knowledge of the artist's intention, and the apprehension or misapprehension of the artwork's viewers, and the validity or lack thereof of particular institutions of art. When it comes down to it, for anything beyond the obvious, only the hypothetical cultural "person", society personified, can and does validly make the judgement.

What strikes me is that there are certain presumptions built into saying this or that is or isn't art, which are easy to miss, and which often include knowledge of the artist's intention, and the apprehension or misapprehension of the artwork's viewers, and the validity or lack thereof of particular institutions of art. When it comes down to it, for anything beyond the obvious, only the hypothetical cultural "person", society personified, can and does validly make the judgement. — Baden

I’m more and more open minded as I get older, which isn’t usually the way! I’m confident enough to not care if I don’t “get” it or think someone is bullshitting. I’m happy to say it is a piece of work that does nothing for me but don’t dismiss it. The most artistic thing Hirst did was amass millions. I was quite impressed.
As for violence as art. Why not?

You cannot have violence as art, — Christoffer

Why not? Two men in a gallery intentionally have a violent fight. Performance could be art, the blood and sweat left could be art, a video installation of fight could be art. Why not?

No. He was making a spectacle out of physical and mental illness.
Why not?
Because it debases the performer as well as the audience and every generation of notoriety-seekers becomes more brutal and the audience, more callous. We're fast approaching the Middle Ages in public entertainment, as well as politics.