L'art qui fait débat Cours

The 19^th and 20^th centuries saw unprecedented changes and variety in the arts, as artists broke away from conventions and experimented with new media, playing around new concepts and values. Path-breaking artistic and philosophical movements took root in this fruitful period.

When critics, readers, viewers or audiences disagree on how the possible interpretations of a work of art, controversies often begin, dividing generations of people within the same family or nation. 

This happened to Conrad's polemical Heart of Darkness, published in 1899, due to the author's ambiguous take on colonization which is now understood by some as plain racism. The narrator's description of the Congo as threateningly wild territory ("the earth seemed unearthly") and his portrayal of the native people as "prehistoric" and "ugly" prompted Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe to claim that "Heart of Darkness projects the image of Africa as "the other world," the antithesis of Europe and therefore of civilization, a place where man's vaunted intelligence and refinement are finally mocked by triumphant bestiality." Heart of Darkness deals with a sea-faring explorer named Marlow who has been commissioned to travel from Belgium to Africa and sail up river Congo to bring back Kurtz, a lost ivory trader, the epitome of the white predatory colonizer. The story is told orally by Marlow himself. According Achebe's reading of Heart of Darkness in his essay "An Image of Africa", published in 1975, Joseph Conrad expressed the impossibility for white Europeans to acknowledge that African cultures and societies might have been as sophisticated as theirs. Hence their need to belittle African people's customs, traditions and lifestyles through racist writings and art pieces, a reading consistent with quite a few passages in the novel, including the following.

Most works of art or books deemed shocking were thought so for breaking the rules that defined morality and propriety, i.e. what audiences were entitled to think and do and what they weren't. Quite a few artists owe their fame to challenging or transgressing these rules. Playwright and novelist Oscar Wilde was considered a scandalously decadent artist, because he flouted morality and propriety. His shocking masterpiece, The Picture of Dorian Gray, is an illustration of this provocative statement.

The Picture of Dorian Gray is the story of a conscience-free murder and fin de siècle rake obsessed with youth and beauty is totally out of keeping with Victorian values. It presents readers with an idle, pleasure-seeking young man who dedicates himself to revelling and seducing men and women. A sheer hedonist, he has no intention to settle down and lead a less turbulent life, his only purpose being to be admired and sought after. Through Dorian Gray, Wilde brazenly promotes capital sins such as lechery, laziness, greed and vanity. At the beginning of the novel, Dorian commissions a painter, Basil Hallward, to make his portrait. Like Narcissus, he falls in love with his own image which starts bearing the ugly marks of his immoral conduct and murderous deeds. Dorian's face on the picture becomes more and more shrivelled and repellent with the passage of time, leaving him spotlessly young. When Dorian finds out about this supernatural fact, he hides his portrait in his attic to avoid facing his ugliness and his conscience. It is as if not seeing the painting enabled him to be in denial of his evil nature and repress his sins, thus never feeling guilty or atoning for it all. When Dorian dies after stabbing his portrait at the end of the novel, his hideousness, so far reflected by the painting, is transferred to his lifeless body. When the servants and the police find him, they don't identify him with Dorian Gray. That's how he gets away with murder and disgrace, leaving his reputation unblemished by what he did and will never be discovered.

What was deemed particularly outrageous in Wilde's novel is the fact that Oscar Wilde doesn't really punish or dispose of his protagonist. His body may have died, but his riveting beauty will continue to fascinate people thanks to the painting. Some may even turn him into a legend or myth, ignoring they would be worshipping a criminal. What remains of Dorian is a picture that will be considered as a faithful representation of who he was. He will be remembered as a charming young man, when he was actually an evil person. There are two possible interpretations of this ending; art is superior to real life because beauty is above morality or hypocrisy will always win over honesty. Thus, Wilde demonstrates the truthful relevance of his aesthetic principles and throws light on the dire consequences of people's hypocritical behaviours. Far from being all virtuous, the Victorians were experts at hiding their immoral desires and deeds whilst lecturing others on their conduct like paragons of morality. Beauty was one of Wilde's leading life principles, as is evidenced both by this story and the author's finely crafted prose. 

The controversial moral of Wilde's Picture of Dorian Gray is not the only thing that shocked readers in 1896. The original text, which was discovered and published very recently, contained explicit references to extra-marital sex and homosexuality. That's why the publisher expurgated the manuscript without its author's consent in order to make it more marketable. In other words, the text was censored. It was so common in Victorian times to remove words referring to the facts of life or to alter passages describing inappropriate situations and behaviours that a verb was created – to bowdlerize – after Thomas Bowdler, an editor who published The Family Shakespeare, an expurgated version of the bard's plays suitable for children.

Much like Oscar Wilde in his own time, iconoclastic artists seek to question or debunk founding myths, beliefs and values a society or community of people was built on. Their aim is often to throw light on the hypocrisy or the lies that serve to manipulate people or lure them into a sense of belonging. 

In the 1960s Roy Lichtenstein, Tom Wesselmann, James Rosenquist and Andy Warhol tapped into the booming popular culture of their time to create controversial iconoclastic works of art. They both derided and revealed the full artistic potential of this emerging new culture made of soap operas, comics, malls, blockbusters and weekly stars. Their flashy compositions combined quintessentially American items and people like one-dollar bills, burgers and chips, film stars, popular brands or the star-spangled banner. Pop artists' work offers us a critical reflection on what defines America and Americans after all – is it a set of common values or material things and magazine icons? The consumer society was Pop artists' main target. They denounced the growing need for useless mass-produced objects stimulated by adverts and commercials which turned people into compulsive buyers on the hunt for the latest item of clothing or cooking utensil. Their paintings act as eye-openers on the viewer, who feels overwhelmed with objects and images put randomly together, as if to imitate consumers getting more and more things as they go, without any real purpose to acquire them. 

He aim may also be to reveal what some artists regard as the true hidden or underlying meaning of an existing work of art. Fairy tales, for instance, are often retold or revamped.

Art can be disturbing. Writers can write without filters. In art, to unclothe and disclose the human body has also always been quite disturbing.

Many writers today have discarded propriety in favour of a filter-free authenticity often expressed through graphic violence and crude language, as in Southern literature. It specific brand of genuinely American literature, well-known for its depictions of pathetic characters and tragic misfits trapped in unsettling environments. It is called "southern" because its most prominent representatives such as writers William Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor and Carson McCullers lived in the southern states. Their fiction explores the complex mysteries of love and family relationships through their destabilizing use of exaggeration and the grotesque.

The human body is an unmissable feature in the art world and a source of inspiration for many sculptors and painters. From ancient nudes to quattro cento lascivious Venuses and Nikki de Saint-Phalle's buxom Nanas, most artists' aim has been to enhance the beauty of the human body and celebrate its perfection. Because they were consistent with the changing conceptions of feminine and masculine beauty through time, these idealised representations became the norms for centuries. It was only in the 19^th century that artists' views of human and aesthetic beauty started to shift from ideal representations to more realistic – and therefore shocking – depictions of actual men's and women's bodies suddenly appeared on painters' canvases, much to the dismay of critics and viewers.

Whether art by women should be labelled as such or not be distinguished from men's art has been and still is a much debated question."Women's art" would become a specific category that would single out female artists as peculiar artists, thus using their gender as the main lens or filter through which to view and appraise their works of art.

Historically, women have been male artists' and writers' muses and/or assistants, i.e. reduced to ancillary partners or objects. As such, they tended to play a minor, even passive role in creative processes. This is what the Guerilla Girls humorously intended to denounce with their famous poster. 

There is also the question as to whether female artists focus on or specialise on allegedly feminine subjects such as interiors, gardens, mothers and children, fashion. Many critics and art historians have underlined that women would favour these subjects because they were part of the daily environment in which they were confined, hence the limiting sources of inspiration and the assumption that female artists weren't as creative, innovative and talented as men.

In 1929, Virginia Woolf wrote that "A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction." in her landmark essay on women's literature A Room of One's Own. She insists that female artists and writers need a creative space that they can claim as theirs, separate from the rest of her home where she performs her domestic duties. Whether a studio or a study, this room would be her private refuge and territory, allowing her to enjoy a few necessary getaways into her inner world. During the second half of the 20^th century, a new approach to women's art and literature emerged under the aegis of American academics Sandra Gilbert, Sarah Gubar and Elaine Showalter. These three scholars claimed that literature by women should be dealt with and studied as a literature of a kind, because whatever women wrote had been informed by their reduced economic and social circumstances. Theirs is quite a controversial stance insofar as it implies that there are essentially feminine subjects and ways of writing, an argument that is still used today to discredit female writers and artists. This notwithstanding, women's traditional place and roles in society has long caused them to juggle their artistic ambitions and wifely duties, often to the detriment of their creativity which couldn't thrive. That's what Gilbert and Gubar emphasize in their edifying body of literary criticism, The Madwoman in the Attic (1979).

Experimental art has different forms. Ever since its tremendous development in the early 18^th century, the novel has been one of writers' favourite media to carry out narrative and literary experiments. Over the last decades, quite a few visual artists have started to experiment with new technologies.

Novel is a very popular and malleable genre, the novel offers writers limitless possibilities, whether they want to experiment with characters or narration, or even language. Through their characters, novelists can also convey political ideas and moral values, as did Ayn Rand in her two novels The Fountainhead (1943) and Atlas Shrugged (1957).

Painters are also experimenting.

David Hockney's various attempts at representing landscapes from various standpoints at the same time have led him to use camcorders and tablets to purse his very fruitful artistic research.

Just like beauty is said to be "in the eye of the beholder", meaning can be found these in the viewer's minds and therefore depends on his or her background and gender. Another fashionable tendency in the art world is to modify, adapt or refresh plays or operas to make them resonate with contemporary world views and values. 

It has become a tendency among critics and viewers to relate to and interpret a work of art through the lens of their emotions, beliefs and political ideas.

To modify, adapt or refresh pieces of art is often done. As a result, these works of art are no longer considered as part of a given social, political, economic and cultural context, but studied, interpreted and understood as illustrations of what today's society rejects or disapproves. This often leads to censorship.