What To Censure and When?

I wrote to a good friend of mine. “It's strange, isn't it, taking art seriously? It's a thing almost always on the verge of mere entertainment. And yet, for the artist, or at least the serious artist, it appears as either dross or gold.”

In a word, art either succeeds or it is not art. I grant, of course, that there is such a thing as degrees in single art pieces. To the majority of poets, Shakespeare stands alone. To the majority of novelists, Dostoevsky is our premier Russian author. But it does not follow that Frost can’t write beautiful lines, or the Tolstoy wasted ink on War and Peace. And though I think the success of an artists depends in great part to his/her talent, I do not think that success alone makes a good artist. I do not mean to use success in the sense of fame. I use success to mean that the artist creates within their mode—be it writing, painting, or music—in conjunction with a fundamental human way of interacting with reality better than others. The better they accomplishes this end, the more like reality their art appears, the greater their degree of success, the better their art.

Camus’ The Stranger appears to me as successful art. Though terrible and empty, like all things in cahoots with nihilism and Nietzsche, The Stranger turns out to be evocative precisely because it advertises the possibility that nothing is really evocative. The same can be said of the majority of Faulkner’s work. In a less austere way, the second chapter of Milton’s Paradise Lost appeals to the same sentiments.

Yet, upon reading Iris Murdoch for the past month, I cannot help but begin to make a tetradistinction between good and bad art, successful and unsuccessful art. The same of the good and bad artists, not merely the successful artist. The relationship between ethics and aesthetics is a tangled and confusing one, and I will not attempt to unravel it here.

But what I do wish to do is espouse the possibility that there is such a thing as successful art which is also bad art. That is to say, that there is such a thing as powerful, moving, pieces which ought never have been created. Pieces, moreover, that ought never be read, or looked at, or experienced. As of yet I am unsure what to make of Plato’s proposal that art ought to be censured. Augustine thinks so; so does Kant; so does O’Conner. They doubtless all take different approaches to the censuring: Plato goes political. Augustine takes it as a matter of moral psychology. Kant approaches it epistemologically. O’Conner turns to the authority of the church.

In certain cases, the proposal will seem blatant and obvious. Sophisticated pornography, a thing which undoubtedly exists, and extends beyond mere entertainment, ought not be created or looked at. But what do we make of pieces like The Stranger or Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury or even Milton’s Paradise Lost? The mode by which we interact with these pieces influences us subconsciously. We are taught evil or good through our sentiments, taught to attach ourselves to certain philosophical principles unknowingly. Only after intense internal reflection do we grow aware of just how this or that piece formed us.

It might be that, like children, we can only expose certain things at certain times. Given normal circumstances, the sex talk with a 5 year old is probably not appropriate. But the sex talk with a 13 year old is another matter. It might be such an individualized matter that the only generalizing we may do is say that we must censure all art on an individual basis.