likely to nurture such efforts. Defenders of experimentalism often recom-
mend Kleist’sThe Marquise of Oand the Marquis de Sade’sJulietteas morally
unconventional works of art that might help to widen our sensibilities.
Controversial works are frequently defended by invoking both autono-
mism and experimentalism. The art critic Lucy Lippard makes a case for the
significance and value of Serrano’sPiss Christby arguing that it“is a darkly
beautiful photographic image ...the small wood and plastic crucifix
becomes virtually monumental as it floats, photographically enlarged, in a
deep rosy glow that is both ominous and glorious.”^24 Here Lippard appeals to
a formal value–beauty–the instancing of which in artifacts is taken to be a
central function of art, distinct from other functions fulfilled within other
practices and capable, perhaps, of overriding other meanings. But Lippard
also characterizesPiss Christas offering unfamiliar insights and so provoking
the enlargement of sensibility. Serrano, according to Lippard, is concerned to
denounce cheapened and commercial religious institutions and to present
genuine religious commitment as incorporating, at least sometimes, an
ecstatic acceptance of the human body, including every aspect of its flesh
and fluids.^25
In reaction to such appeals to formal values and provocative meanings,
some viewers of the work are likely to feel puzzled or outraged. In 1975, well
before the wide notoriety of Serrano, Finley, bodily performance art, and
other forms of avant-gardism, Tom Wolfe already worried that avant-
gardism had degenerated into a stale, repetitive, formally and cognitively
insignificant game of“épatez le bourgeoisie, shock the middle class,”^26 driven
only by adolescent rebelliousness and commercialism rather than by any
genuine concern for art. But then this is as it may be, depending on the
historical reasons that can be discerned to figure in the production of avant-
garde work and on the critical elucidations of an avant-garde work’s formal
and cognitive significance that can be constructed.^27 Stravinsky, Joyce, and
(^24) Lucy Lippard,“The Spirit and the Letter,”Art in America80, 4 (April 1990), pp. 238–45 at
p. 239. I base my account of Lippard’s defense of Serrano on Cynthia Freeland’s discus-
sion of it in herBut is it Art?, pp. 18–26.
(^25) See the discussion of Lippard’s defense of the meritorious thematic content or meaning
of Serrano’s work in Freeland,But is it Art?, pp. 20–21.
(^26) See Wolfe,Painted Word, p. 14.
(^27) See Chapter 6 above.
Art and morality 231