The Nonexistence of “Unethical Art”
Photo courtesy of Winkleman Gallery, New York.
I’ll agree with Ben Street who said in his recent post that there is “no consensus about the difference between ethics and morals, so let’s be broad about it.” This seems to be the most helpful way to have a constructive conversation. It also helps me to excuse why I’ll interchange the two throughout this text in the service of brevity. Also, in order to avoid an annoying series of additional caveats, I’ll note first off that I’m limiting my considerations here to art objects (which include video and film, in my opinion) and not performances or other such live actions.
Oscar Wilde wrote, “There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written.” Replace “artwork” where “book” appears and “made” where “written” appears, and you’ll have a concise summary of my answer to the question, “Must art be moral [or ethical]?” To suggest that “art” can be either ethical or unethical is to personify an object. We don’t talk about the ethics or morality of a hammer or an ocean. We may discuss the ethics of what humans do with a hammer or what they do to an ocean, but ethics are a means of measuring human behaviors. Therefore, it’s actually nonsensical to me to discuss whether an art object must be ethical or unethical. Art cannot be either. Artists can and, to my mind should, be ethical, being fellow human beings within a society, but “art” itself is not human.
Moreover, the subject matter of art cannot be considered “ethical” or “moral” any more than the object itself. All manner of abhorrent human behaviors are represented in artwork. That doesn’t make the work, or even the artist, unethical for tackling such subjects. We wouldn’t suggest that the painter who captures the extreme suffering of a brutal mass murder (clearly an immoral act), such as Picasso’s Guernica, had done anything immoral himself. Nor would we suggest that the act of painting The Rape of the Sabine Women was a good reason to arrest Jacques-Louis David or Nicholas Poussin. In my opinion, how true the representation seems (part of how high the quality of the work is) remains the only valid issue where subject matter is concerned. Is it well-made or poorly made?
