A Much Tamer Art

The premiere of Igor Stravinsky's ballet The Rite of Spring in Paris in 1913 was a seminal event in music history, not least because of the audience's negative response to the work. Based on a tale of pagan Russia in which a maiden dances herself to death as part of a ritual associated with the spring equinox, it combined that with Stravinsky's atonal music and provocative choreography by Vaslav Nijinsky, a triple threat that shocked the people of Paris. The riot that followed is the stuff of legend, as people made such an uproar that property in the theatre was damaged, and the din was so loud that the dancers couldn't hear the music, and Nijinsky had to direct them from the wings. 

On the other hand, a 1996 piece by the Nigerian painter Chris Ofili created a controversy for the use of the traditional material of lacquered elephant dung in a portrayal of the Virgin Mary as a black woman, an artwork which he called the 'hip-hop' version of previous religious images. This scatologisation of a religious figure was inevitably met with opprobrium from many Christian groups, especially when the work was displayed at the Brooklyn Museum, but more than that, it was turned into a political object. Despite never having seen the work, the erstwhile mayor of New York, Rudy Giuliani took advantage of the controversy in a bid for a second term, attempting to win votes from conservatives. 

These two contrasting incidents, a little more than eighty years apart, are illustrative of how, in a world driven by novelty and spurred on by the need for the next new sensation, art no longer necessarily has its power to shock; moreover, even if it does, this power is immediately commodified or politicized as part of a larger narrative. 

Works like Stravinsky's ballet, Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot, or Pablo Picasso's Les Demoiselles de Avignon, transgressed moral standards at the time when they were released, but did so in a way that did not necessarily intend to shock. Rather, all three merely attempted to provide a new way of viewing the same thing - whether it was ballet, the modern predicament or the depiction of the nude in art. As Picasso himself said, works of art were not just supposed to be innovative for the sake of innovation, or "to decorate apartments … It is an instrument of offensive and defensive war against the enemy." 

Modern day works that have provoked outrage, transgress moral boundaries in society not as an instrument of war against these standards but as a way of generating novelty and buzz. Part of this may also be because of social media, which makes it easy to stir up discussion about a controversial work and draw more attention to it. 

Recent works that have thrived off social media buzz include the Netflix show Cuties, which critiques the sexualisation of young girls in a way that many argued involves frequent depictions of young girls being sexualised, or the music video of the rapper Lil Nas X's song Montero, which involved imagery that many viewed as Satanic. However, Montero is particularly interesting in this regard, as the perceived controversy around it in fact may have helped boost streams of the song, which eventually reached the top of the Billboard charts. Thus, controversy may at times be profitable.

The question of whether art can shock is closely linked, of course, to society's prevailing moral standards. The world that was shocked by the works of Stravinsky and Picasso had far more rigid moral standards than the one we live in today, which was perhaps the reason why these groundbreaking works had such an impact. It becomes more difficult for modern artists, musicians and writers to find new boundaries to transgress, and even as they do so, their work becomes even easier to commodify, turning polemics into profits.

The use of shock as a device to gain attention is not in itself new. Even historically, controversial art may have been as much geared towards attention as it is now. For example, Èdouard Manet's nude painting Olympia was exhibited in Paris in 1865 to an uproar, which contemporary observers believed to have been deliberate: "a parti pris on his part, a sort of ironic defiance hurled at the jury and the public." It was not merely an intellectual defiance of the artistic status quo, but equally a publicity move designed to draw public attention towards the artist. 

Furthermore, the idea of society having become less rigid when it comes to artistic transgressions of its moral boundaries may just be a Eurocentric concept. Adam Thirlwell, writing in the Guardian, argues that the Enlightenment in the West came with a certain confidence to shatter or mock social boundaries in art and literature, but that not all artistic forms interact with their parent societies the same way. 

He cites the example of the Russian punk band Pussy Riot, whose performance in Moscow, Mother of God, Chase Putin Out, led to them being put on trial. In Rwanda, cartoonists were tried for war crimes after the genocide in that country. In India, public outcry and protests against the author Perumal Murugan, for his literary depiction of restrictive caste relations and the impact rituals have on people's lives, were so intense that they led him to commit what was called "literary suicide" in 2014, withdrawing all his written work and ending his literary career. Thus, art has not lost its ability to provoke and enrage people independently of attempts to commercialize it; it may just be that the impact is seen more in non-Western societies these days.

While we have become more jaded in our response to daring art, the works that aim to shock us and critique our society and culture are now quieter, more mainstream and less outrageous, Thirlwell argues. Instead of the daring, revolutionary rhythms of Stravinsky's Rite of Spring, we now have works like Yinka Shonibare's Odile and Odette - a commentary on race and symbolism in visual culture and ballet, which was sponsored by as mainstream an organization as the Royal Ballet, but did not lack power, emotion or a pressing need for change. 

Thus, the question of whether art can still shock us, shifts to become an even more relevant and important one - the question of whether art still wields, in whatever form, the power to change us, the way we look at things, and the world we live in.

Image credits: By Pablo Picasso - Museum of Modern Art, New York, PD-US, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=547064