Beauty and Substance

To give you a more relatable approach regarding the topic at hand, allow me to share with you a tale of two Johnnys.

First Johnny is an actor. A multi awarded one who has been in show business for 35 years and nominated for ten Golden Globe Awards and three Academy Awards for Best Actor, bagging one of them for his performance of the title role in Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street in 2008. I'm talking about no less than the critically acclaimed actor Johnny Depp. To survive the glitz, glamour and gore of the limelight, an actor like him needs to be tougher than the toughest of nails and yet, here he is battling allegations in two courts - one, the US court with a publicly recognized judge and two, the social media court with the public itself as the judge. Clamor for the boycott of movies he is starring has been going around in social media last year with the entire petition hinged on his alleged domestic blunder. Makes you wonder if indeed we can refrain ourselves from supporting his art simply because of moral issues. Can we truly say that a person doesn't deserve merit because we perceive their morals as polar opposite of ours?

Second Johnny is one from the underworld of film. He lurks in the dark yet often frequented depths of the film industry that he assumes a pseudonym to protect what little he may have left to protect which to be completely honest, is mostly just himself. His films are some of the most viewed in the adult movies category. From his point of view, he is an actor and a great one even. He shifts from teacher to fireman to cowboy effortlessly and has become a secret household name one can only utter in the most private of moments. And now we are put in a position for the second time, to wonder if like the case of Johnny Depp, we can refrain ourselves from supporting the second Johnny's art simply because of moral issues.

Let me put this forward before we go any further, our stand is not on radical autonomism but ethical autonomism.

According to Professor Rob van Gerwen of Utrecht University in the Netherlands:

"...It seems to follow that, since an artistically bad work of art is morally reprehensible, it is also morally bad to create a bad work of art. First, this would introduce artistic creativity into the very class of everyday actions and would thus allow for criminal offences here too; and second, it seems incompatible with the standard view that artistic success cannot be enforced. I see the point of this remark but remind the reader that I nowhere alluded to the artist as the one morally assessable. Instead, I devised a way to think about the moral assessment of works, and merely argued that such an assessment would have to assume that the work be conceived of as a moral agent, the logical consequence of which would be that it is the work that would receive the moral verdict (and its consequences). The objection that ethical autonomism thinks that all bad works are also morally bad derives its bite as an objection from our fears for moralistic censorship and juridical punishment. I fail, however, to see the pertinence of such fears."

I will breakdown the concept into bite sized pieces for easier understanding.

Ethical autonomism does not view a work of art as a moral agent. In the sense that it acknowledges a person's individual morals which are ultimately shaped by, but not restricted to, his environment, personal experiences and doctrines which were instilled during childhood. This is not to say that we do not acknowledge the emotional and psychological effects and triggers a piece of art can invoke on a person. However, a person's decision on how to best handle these effects and triggers will be based on personal morals which includes both commonly accepted morals (for example, genocide which we can all - by all meaning regardless of race, age etc. agree is inhuman) and unique individual morals (say, agreement to same sex marriage). To say that we will be criticizing a work of art based on nothing but morals - morals which are as diverse as they are complex, makes the criticism arbitrary and unfair.

There is also the point with regard to autonomy and artistic attitude. Allow me to quote Professor van Gerwen, again:

"What turns the moral evaluation of art into such a confusing issue is that works that confront us in an engaging manner with moral issues do so against the very background of this, art's moral autonomy. It may appear an undue abstraction to state the autonomy of the artistic practice as a whole, and to attribute it to individual works of art only in so far as they are art, instead of, contingently, in regard of their particular contents or meaning. The way to grasp this is through the notion of the artistic attitude."

"...Basically, to allow the representation to manifest its particular meaning, a beholder has to acknowledge how his beholding body no longer makes up the centre of his perceiving, abstracting, automatically, from this exemplary moral situation he is in. Thus, abstaining from morally relevant responses is part of the phenomenological specifics of representation. It might, therefore, seem silly to admonish art for requiring audiences to take up an artistic attitude; ought implies can. Yet, art aims at providing absorbing experiences with, often, a psychological and moral profundity. Yet it offers these morally profound experiences while requiring an artistic attitude, which requirement intrudes in persons' psychological motivation for doing the good, in one's conscience. This is, at the least, a moral paradox."

In other words, our thoughts and responses on a particular art only becomes an issue once we enter the threshold of wanting to "consume" a represented object and feeling satisfaction by this phenomenon. Case in point is a pornographic film being "consumed" by a person in search for sexual gratification.

To tie everything together, we believe that morality draws the line and as van Gerwen puts it, "guards art's gates". However we should note, and this is important, that once art passes this line, art criticism based on aesthetics of design and composition comes in. Since the threshold is surpassed, it is safe to base our judgement completely on its aesthetic merits. Should a work of art fail to pass these aesthetic merits then we can rightfully punish it by letting it slip away into nothingness and oblivion.

Reference:

Van Gerwen, Rob. “Ethical Autonomism: Work of Art as Moral Agent.” Ethical Autonomism: The Work of Art as a Moral Agent, 2018, contempaesthetics.org/newvolume/pages/article.php?articleID=217#FN16link.