success.^49 There may indeed be such cases. But they do not show that the
morally reprehensible attitude that such a work invites and prescribes
itself in fact counts as either an artistic virtue or as artistically neutral.
Once it is noticed, it will, as Kieranand Gaut claim, reasonably count to
some extent against a sense that the work is artistically successful. Leni
Riefenstahl’sThe Triumph of the Willis frequently cited as a work that is
artistically successful despite being morally flawed in prescribing admir-
ation for Hitler and the racial project of national socialism. But as Carroll
himself notes, it is at least“problematic”thatThe Triumph of the Willis“an
aesthetically good film”:“seen in its entirety and not in the edited versions
that are usually screened, it is immensely boring, full of tedious Nazi party
speeches.”^50 This is one way of saying that it is artistically bad because the
unmerited emotional and evaluative responses it prescribes are not
incidental.
Clarificationism and responding to complexity
It is important, also, that there are complex, hard cases. A work may plausibly
invite, prescribe, and clarify a number of conflicting attitudes toward the same
character and course of action. We may feel that Hamlet in his delay is both
immaturely self-indulgent and appropriately deeply troubled about the claims
of conscience and the exercise of power. Lester Burnham, the Kevin Spacey
characterinthefilmAmerican Beauty, is both adolescently escapist and con-
cerned to resist the staleness and lack of life that surrounds him in the
suburbs, while being prepared to find beauty in the smallest corner of it.
Karen Finley and Andres Serrano can strike us both as mere publicity-seeking
provocateurs and as paying attention to social phenomena and attitudes
toward them that are badly in need of clarification. Such complex cases may
suggest at first blush that moral defects and virtues are not always artistic
defects and virtues, since we do not know quite what coherently to think and
feel in the face of them. Their moral import seems unclear, and their artistic
success seems, at least in some cases, evident. In fact, however, their artistic
(^49) Gaut holds only that unmerited prescribed evaluative responses arepro tantoor to-a-
certain-extent reasons for regarding a work as artistically flawed. Though genuine, they
can, if incidental, be outweighed by other reasons. SeeArt, Emotion, and Ethics, pp. 58–65.
(^50) Ibid., p. 380.
Art and morality 237