Some Reflections on Art and Ethics

Writing Life

1. Art is basically the subconscious. It is a sacrosanct domain that involves perfect freedom. Asking for ethics in art is a little bit like asking for ethics in dreams. Art simply has its own laws of gravity.

2. However, the dangerous aspects of art make us as a society extremely careful to draw boundaries around art, to mark out what is art and what is life. We do this with all sorts of magic spells — with the phrase “once upon a time” to start a story, with the frame around a picture, with the lights coming down before a play or movie, with the orchestra tuning up. This need for framing, with framing being just as much the essence of art as its subconscious explorations are, explains why immersive theater, performance art, etc, are always (to me anyway) so unsatisfying. The frame is broken and we are no longer safe — we are forced to return to our animalistic fight or flight modes as opposed to feeling as if we can let our imagination and subconscious run wild. Tom Stoppard explores this in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead with a character learning the hard way (for the condemned man especially) that hanging a man as part of a performance — the character has an arrangement with a local prison — actually takes an audience out of a play as opposed to injecting additional realism. It’s the difference between sex and rape or between sharing a joke with friends and having to listen as the serial killer laughs maniacally over you as you are tied to a post. Establishing, and securing, that boundary is as important as anything else in the artistic endeavor.

3. Conversely, once you are within the domain of art and the boundary is secure, there is an obligation to be as risky as possible. Caution is a virtue in real life, but in art it’s death. We have already accepted the deal to enter into the realm of the subconscious and, once we are in, we want to really know what it says, where the truth is. Our dreams don’t lie and neither should our art. Usually, the best way to get to this level of risk-taking is to trust one’s intuition, but to really trust it — and to keep one’s conscious mind with all of its worries and prudences out of it as much as possible. I remember being in an improv class. One of the actors, who was pretty pent-up, far from the best actor in the room, was talking about his girlfriend. He was critical of her, but in a very restrained way — we felt that he was holding back and we hated him for it. Then, in part through the teacher’s prodding, he broke through. In his monologue, he called her a “bitch” and everybody in the room — women, men, everybody, felt an immense aesthetic satisfaction. It had to do with seeing a pent-up person breaking through to a freer part of themselves. It only worked because the boundary was airtight between the world of the improv class and the outside world — if anybody had a camera phone on, if anybody had shared what had happened with the girlfriend, if anybody had objected to the language, it all would have been ruined. And that boundary held once we exited the space as well. What the actor had said in the improv room was absolutely not a license for him to act in the same way outside the space; how it worked was that he had let something out, had freed some part of himself within a safe expressive space, and that presumably allowed him to better work through his own violent repressions, to dance with his shadow, and to be in more puissant control of himself so that he could better interact with his girlfriend without always being on the cusp of exploding.

4. On the other hand, nothing is worse than cheats, than people who are provocative for its own sake or for their own opportunism. If that actor had walked determinedly into the center of the room and called his girlfriend a “bitch” we would have hated him just as much as we would hate somebody who does that in regular life. The artistic zone creates a license, and we despise nobody so much as those who abuse the trust of that license. They are the serpents in the garden. Telling them apart from the genuine article is the work of the critic.

5. There is a very complicated question going the rounds about the ethical responsibility that art has to life. This is heightened in the era of autofiction and the memoir-craze, where the boundaries of art and life are more blurred than ever. On the one side is “art for art’s sake,” which has become kind of meaningless as a term but usually means that art is primary, that life is, at its best, a kind of rough draft for art, which has the very un-life-like ability to cut through to the essential. On the other side is the argument that that way lies the ‘art monsters’ and that art may have its own aesthetic field but that the laws of aesthetics don’t somehow supersede or obviate ordinary decency and morality. If you write directly about someone, as Bellow did about Allan Bloom or as Sonya Larson did in writing a scathing short story about a colleague (an incident that has become one of these ethical test cases of the autofiction-era), and you are cutting or mean about that person, or betray the confidence of that person, and do so for the permanent record, then you are an asshole no matter how good the quality of the writing. I have at different moments of my life been sympathetic to the different positions here, but, on balance, I come down hard in the second camp. “They’re just books,” Percival Everett said to an interviewer trying to get him to treat his work more sententiously. The aesthetic field is real, and has its own gravity, but it does not offer a dispensation for anything else. If you write about a real person, or if you say something that you wouldn’t in daily life, you are still accountable for what you write or say. You have every right to make your own ethical decisions about what you can live with and what you can’t — I do this all the time, by the way, I put short stories in the drawer because I feel that they give away somebody’s secrets or cling too closely to life; I felt some sort of aesthetic obligation to write the story even if I also feel an ethical obligation to not share it. Sometimes I wittingly transgress, sometimes I inadvertently share something that’s hurtful (and, inevitably, I pay an emotional toll for this, as well I should). The aesthetic has its own claims, but it never simply triumphs. The two domains are competing all the time, and anyone who deals with art of any sort has to make the fraught ethical decisions of how much harm they are willing to cause. I can respect decisions that side with the aesthetic — I probably err in this direction more often than not — but I reject entirely any suggestion that art itself offers some sort of absolution. You are making the decision; on your head be it.