and works that aim as much at entertainment as at art. Attention, even when
closely focused on a particular subject matter, may well include discerning
features that it shares with other subjects, so that it is natural that there
should be some more genres that draw on standardized ways of structuring
an image or presenting a plot in painting, photography, literature, music,
and the other arts. The achievement of attention and the clarification of an
emotion can take place, sometimes and for some subject matters, both
through pushing experimentally against the boundaries of a genre and
within a more realist genre through exceptional mastery of details and
effects in a medium. All that must be resisted is cliché, inattentiveness, and
predictable propagandist rhetorizing.
As we think about the moral significance via clarification that art aims to
achieve, it is important to keep in mind two things. First, the making of a
work of art is a human action. It is, hence, unlike a mere reaction (such as a
wince) or a behavior (such as breathing), necessarily to some extent informed
by and assessable in terms of reasons. We can ask why an artist has done just
that. If the answer is“In order simply to shock, propagandize, make a
reputation, or sentimentalize,”then we will tend to conclude that the action
in question is not (genuinely or fully) that of making art, but rather that of
seeking some other kind of reward or effect than the clarification that art
centrally seeks to offer. This is a plausible diagnosis in, for example, the case
of the Chilean painter and sculptor Antonio Becerra, who with government
arts funding exhibited the taxidermically preserved and painted corpses of
dogs that had been hit by cars, in what he calls“a mix of butchery, sculpture,
and nursing, because I have found dogs on the highway that are half-dead
and I have had to help them.”^91 Of the corpses exhibited, one“bears an oil
painting of Pope John Paul II and a cross on its flank. Another is spotted with
blue and orange butterflies on its white fur. A small brown dog, its back
arched like a cat, has a row of sharp metal spikes inserted down the length of
its spine.”^92 Whatever actions of making and exhibition are in question here,
they are not centrally actions of art, and they are appropriate objects of moral
condemnation and even–supposing they violate health or animal treatment
laws–of criminal prosecution. Works such as those by Finley and Serrano
(^91) Antonio Becerra, quoted in“Dead dogs exhibited as artworks,”a report on his work by
Gabriela Donoso, Reuters, printed inPhiladelphia Inquirer, August 27, 2002, section E, p. 7.
(^92) Ibid.
Art and morality 245