The cross : Can we judge art in the name of ethics?
Carole Talon Hugon : I believe so, because art cannot be reduced to forms: it is caught up in a network of meanings, intentions, expectations and values, including moral values. Works can affect our lives, for good or ill. The idea that art has nothing to do with extra-aesthetic values is quite modern.
It is in the middle of the XIXe century that a conception of autonomous art, of “art for art’s sake”, theorized by Théophile Gautier and Oscar Wilde, developed. Thus, the idea that art would be totally detached from ethics constitutes a parenthesis in history, a parenthesis which has been closing over the past twenty years. Sounds like a good thing to me.
How to consider the relationship between art and ethics, without falling back into a submission of art to morality which has prevailed for a long time?
C. T.-H. : For my part, I defend a “reflective moralism”, which integrates moral value without giving it the only place. It is not a question of yielding to a radical moralism, which has existed in history and which, visibly, tempts some people today. It is however a question of refusing a “radical autonomism” which would like that morality has nothing to do with art.
I consider that the moral value of a work is part of its artistic value – which should not be reduced to its aesthetic value. Morally reprehensible content negatively affects the value of the work, just as high moral content increases its artistic value.
How can we explain the place taken today by moral judgments in artistic matters?
C. T.-H. : It seems to me linked to the transformations of art itself. It has become impossible to justify its autonomy when the perimeter of artistic practice has become blurred and art is now an object connected to many sectors: fashion, technology, design… Moreover, the standards of the different arts that allowed for the evaluation of works have disappeared, leaving a void that ethical criticism seems to me to fill.
How to decipher the reproach of immorality addressed to certain works?
C. T.-H. : What impresses me today is the multiplication of charges against works. Traditionally, on the moral level, three reproaches dominated: to make evil exist by representing it; cause deleterious effects on the behavior of spectators; to aestheticize what morally cannot be, for example photographing corpses.
Now, new charges are emerging. The reproach linked to breaches of morality, not of the work but of its author, which would lead to condemning the work, by capillarity; the reproach of cultural appropriation, which affirms for example that one does not have the right to speak about the condition of the Blacks without being black; finally, the invocation of the negative emotional reactions provoked by a work. A work would be to be condemned because individuals felt hurt by it. These new charges, more or less questionable, lead to a number of potentially indefinite convictions.
Do you fear the development of a spirit of censorship?
C. T.-H. : In the case of Miriam Cahn’s painting as in the controversies linked to Balthus’s painting Therese dreaming or the nudes of Egon Schiele, the demands for censorship seem disproportionate to me, given the audiences actually affected by these works, and the fact that they are exhibited in the “distancing” space of the museum and its mediations.
I find the all-out moralization movement that has been developing for ten years in France, and for several decades in the United States, very worrying. It leads to myopic re-readings of art history and produces phenomena of self-censorship among artists. The risk is to see the development of well-meaning, simple or even simplistic works, which avoid depth and complexity. For creation, it would be catastrophic.