The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning

by Maggie Nelson

Overview

"This is criticism at its best." —Carolyn Kellogg, Los Angeles Times

Writing in the tradition of Susan Sontag and Elaine Scarry, Maggie Nelson has emerged as one of our foremost cultural critics with this landmark work about representations of cruelty and violence in art. From Sylvia Plath’s poetry to Francis Bacon’s paintings, from the Saw franchise to Yoko Ono’s performance art, Nelson’s nuanced exploration across the artistic landscape ultimately offers a model of how one might balance strong ethical convictions with an equally strong appreciation for work that tests the limits of taste, taboo, and permissibility.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393082234
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	08/13/2012
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	304
Sales rank:	211,433
File size:	351 KB

About the Author

Maggie Nelson is the author of many acclaimed books of poetry and prose, including Like Love, The Argonauts, and Bluets. She currently teaches at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles.

Table of Contents

Styles of Imprisonment 3

Theaters of Cruelty 15

Great to Watch 31

Captivity, Catharsis 53

Everything is Nice 66

They're Only Dolls 91

The Golden Rule 105

Nobody Said No 119

The Brutality of Fact 131

Who We Are 162

A Situation of Meat 175

Precariousness 191

Inflicted 205

Face 227

Rings of Action 239

Rarer and Better Things 262

Acknowledgments 271

Bibliography 273

Index 279

Editorial Reviews

This is an important and frequently surprising book. By reframing the history of the avant-garde in terms of cruelty…Nelson is taking on modernism's (and postmodernism's) most cherished tenets. After all, aesthetic shock has under­written most of our cultural innovation for over a century. So this book could be read as the foundation for a post-avant-garde aesthetics…Nelson's opinions can be quirky and hard to square with one another, but they never fail to be interesting, quite some accomplishment in what could have been a free-form ramble through the mires of someone else's aesthetic preoccupations.
—The New York Times

Laura Kipnis

The gory, brutal images that swamp modern culture are stupefying and dehumanizing —or maybe not, argues this richly ambivalent study. Poet Nelson (Bluets) surveys cruel art, lowbrow and high, flitting among Hollywood torture-porn and sadistic reality shows, avant-garde films and performance pieces, poetry and literary fiction, and photographs of abused Abu Ghraib prisoners. She repeatedly circles back to a few cruelty auteurs like the painter Francis Bacon and the poet Sylvia Plath. This panorama provokes strong reactions in her, but no dogmas. Nelson rejects the modernist claim that brutality in art provokes cathartic reactions that shock us out of alienation and into social justice, but rejects also the notion that cruel art makes people cruel; she wearies of the entertainment industry's cynical assaults on taste and sensibility—"‘neither I nor the world will be a better place if I ingest a particular cruelty'"—while celebrating provocations that she believes have an undeniable artistic power. Nelson's erudition and wide fluency in artistic and philosophical traditions yield many subtle, insightful readings (her meditation on "brutal honesty" is especially good). But her view of her lurid subject is sometimes too nuanced and unsatisfying. (July)

Publishers Weekly

"[Nelson’s] critiques of individual artists are delightfully fierce without being mean spirited… Fascinating and bracingly intelligent…The Art of Cruelty’s prose is often gorgeous."

Boston Globe - Troy Jollimore

"A lean-forward experience, and in its most transcendent moments, reading it can feel like having the best conversation of your life."

NPR Books - Rachel Syme

"[Nelson] dexterously, and creatively, manages to hold a mirror to our culture’s fascination with cruelty and invites us to reflect on our personal reasons for indulging it."

Literary Hub - Eleni Theodoropoulos

"I hope that critics, and aspiring critics, and those who are interested in the relationship between art and ethics, read [The Art of Cruelty]."

New Republic - Susie Linfield

An important and frequently surprising book . . . could be read as the foundation for a post-avant-garde aesthetics . . . Nelson, who is also a poet, is such a graceful writer that I . . . just sat back and enjoyed the show.” ---New York Times

From the Publisher