On the night of May 13, 1913, Iger Strivinski's the Right of Spring Premiered at the Theatre des champs-elysees, in Paris. As incomprehensible as it is today, the music and dancing was so different from what was traditional that the audience rioted and began to throw whatever was to hand at the performers. The protesters were so loud that the musicians couldn't hear themselves perform. Arguments over artistic quality broke out among the audience with conservatives pitted against lovers of the new.
The work divided the French press, with LaFigaro calling it an unfortunate work of barbarity.
Perhaps I'm dead inside when it comes to classical music, but I hear nothing in this piece that would make me riot.
There have been other examples of art that shocks. These paintings were almost as polarizing as the right of Spring. Long debates used to result within the art world and the engaged members of the public.
The Nude Maja by Francisco Goya
Ten or so years after the right of Spring's debut, Lady Chaderly's lover, a novel about an upper class English lady’s affair with her gardener was broadly condemned by the British establishment as a morally depraved work. Given that the most kinky sex of all kinds is a google search away, the novel is almost tame by modern standards.
Young people might find it surprising just how new that modern era is. Howard Stern, who is also tame by today’s standards was a figure of major controversy in the early eighties. He pretended to be God when giving weather forecasts, talked to women about lesbian experiences, and had a lady achieve orgasm while calling into the show. These bits left social conservatives less than pleased and resulted in FCC fines and public protests.
As recently as the early 2000s, the rapper Eminem created controversy with both social conservatives and the LGBTQ community with violent and homophobic lyrics.
This is the last artist who was majorly controversial and the bridge by which our generation can understand previous art of the past. To his fans, the violent and homophobic lyrics represented a state of mind, they weren't advocating murder or the beating of gay people, they were the feelings of a man expressed in metaphors appropriate to his upbringing.
For art to be shocking, it has to be either doing something so new that it upsets the established artistic order, or something that is a shock to the established morality, that is the broad social consensus.
Liberality has won our current set of culture wars, this decade is characterized by an atmosphere of permissiveness unseen in all of recorded history, I am not saying this is a bad thing, it is simply the reality. The Sopranos or Homeland or the wire could never have run anywhere close to uncut on American television as recently as the year 1995. When the Sopranos was pitched to the big four networks, it was not the violence they objected to, but the moral complexity.
Given this permissiveness, it is my argument that our current society cannot be shocked. We've broken all the taboos. Our moral order allows the word cunt to be said on televisions, and allows rape scenes to be shown in Game of Thrones. The objections raised to these words and scenes are not made on artistic grounds, but rather on grounds of social justice. People do not say game of thrones is 'bad art' they argue it is instead somehow against women.
Do you think art still has the ability to shock? Could a piece of art cause a riot in 2016?
The Nude Maja by Francisco Goya
One Nation Under Socialism by Jon McNaughton
