Crimes of Art

Outrageous. Scandalous. Filthy. Degenerate. Trash. These words have often been used to describe works of art that the viewer finds objectionable. But from where do these deeply seated beliefs come from which we as individuals and as a society use to evaluate the worth and purpose of art? We will begin this class with the presentation of two historical positions on the relationship between art and society, articulated respectively by nineteenth-century decadent writer Oscar Wilde in his aphoristic manifesto “Preface to the Picture of Dorian Gray” and Oxford Professor Mathew Arnold in Culture and Anarchy. These two texts will help orient us towards the often unconscious assumptions and biases we hold in our critical evaluation of literature, as well as to what is potentially at stake when we make these evaluations. We will then engage with texts of various media and historical periods throughout the term—novels, poetry, photography, films, comics, and video games—with each unit calling into relief a certain critical aspect, controversy, or “crime” of art. Our analysis will pivot around Wilde’s and Arnold’s two critical positions, and we will see in turn if our own critical relationships to literature and visual art begins to shift, blur, or is reconfigured. By the end of the course, it is my hope that we will have explored a variety of aesthetic possibilities and their associated stakes, along with a possible reevaluation of our own critical positions.