Morally offensive art, tacky or ugly art, and other breeds of bad art
may have all sorts of unpleasant (or even downright painful) conse-
quences, yet they are not necessarily harmful to the future of art. True to
the liberal ideals espoused by Mill, we should strive to create a society
where a true diversity of opinions and tastes is allowed to freely develop
(even while we pass judgment on those opinions and tastes). If we are to
avoid falling prey to becoming a kind of taste police, we must distinguish
carefully between offensive art and harmful art. For the purposes of my
argument, art that is harmful is not harmful because it is tacky, ugly, in
poor taste, or even offensive, but rather because it puts the very future
existence of art into jeopardy, undermining a primary function of art
(regardless of how that function is executed). While I have a strong inter-
est in the role of aesthetic experience for the humanizing function of art,
I amnotinterested in the particular aesthetic merits (or lack thereof) of
works of art, but rather in identifying the conditions that destroy art’s
humanizing functions and have catastrophic consequences for the future
of all art. My concern is with the conditions that negate art itself.
Art that negates art is caught up in the same sort of alienating and
self-annihilating act as the individual who uses his freedom to abdicate
his freedom. Just as the individual who agrees to become a slave kills all
of her chances at future freedom, so too the artwork that flouts aesthetic
experience, kills the future of art. One can, of course, speak of a human
life, even if a particular individual has used her liberty to become a
slave, and one can speak of a work of art, even if the artist has thumbed
her nose at aesthetic experience, yet just as Mill claims that “it is not
freedom to be allowed to alienate freedom”—so, too, “it is not art to be
allowed to alienate art,” and art that makes aesthetic experience impos-
sible, alienates art, for it undermines the humanizing function of art.Concluding Remarks
The crisis of art is not caused by the fact that some art is too accessible,
that is, so-called “low-brow” art is not a threat to the humanizing power
of art—there is no clear danger in making art accessible. As Paul Cantor
points out in Chapter 1 of this volume, there is a sense in which cater-
ing to the tastes of the public is a way to keep art grounded. Dante was
not the only artist whose work had a healing power for Primo Levi—the
Hollywood movies of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers could do this too
(indeed a reviewer of one of Levi’s biographies complains that the index
does not reference “low-brow” sources of art that were clearly redemp-
tive for Levi).90 Elizabeth Millán