ON EDIT: PERCIVAL, JUST SKIP THIS, OKAY?
Maddy wrote: (jpgs of gorgeous Bruegel and Bosch paintings)
I wonder how many murders these two pieces caused or were blamed for causing?
Hmm. I'm not standing on very firm ground here wrt depth or breadth of info on the subject. But fwiw, as far as I know, neither of those works would have been seen as outrageous by the standards of their place and time. They're just both, especially Bosch, stylistically on the extra-super-mannerist side of early Flemish renaissance popular art. Which tended to retain a few more of the grotesque elements of gothic grotesquery than early Italian renaissance extra-super-mannerist popular art typically did. I think. In a not very well-informed kind of a way. But you know. They're both pretty much within then-acceptably Christian and commercially viable limits in terms of both subject and treatment, to the best of my practically non-existent knowledge.
But. I'd say that the general premise that there's a cause-and-effect relationship between too much exposure to popular art (in whatever form happens also to be the commonest medium for popular
entertainment at any given point in time) and socially degenerate behavior by teenagers and young adults has had at least
some currency in post-Christian western thought pretty much since the dawn of the post-Christian western era. Starting centuries before the recognition of teen- and/or young-adulthood as a distinct phase of social development. The earliest iteration of it that's within my haphazard grasp of cultural history being the fairly straightforward suggestion by Francesca -- upon being asked by Dante in Canto V of
The Inferno by what and in what manner love conceded that she and Paolo should know their dubious desires -- that, basically, Arthurian romance leads to sex:
And she to me: "There is no greater sorrow
Than to be mindful of the happy time
In misery, and that thy Teacher knows.
But, if to recognise the earliest root
Of love in us thou hast so great desire,
I will do even as he who weeps and speaks.
One day we reading were for our delight
Of Launcelot, how Love did him enthral.
Alone we were and without any fear.
Full many a time our eyes together drew
That reading, and drove the colour from our faces;
But one point only was it that o'ercame us.
When as we read of the much-longed-for smile
Being by such a noble lover kissed,
This one, who ne'er from me shall be divided,
Kissed me upon the mouth all palpitating.
Galeotto was the book and he who wrote it.
That day no farther did we read therein."***
[NOTE TO OP ED: No, I'm not saying that this amounts to anything remotely close to a harshly judgmental and anachronistically puritanical moral condemnation of poetry by Dante. Because it doesn't. More like the reverse, in fact.]
So, um...I have a point, and it's this: It seems to me that being ourselves quite naturally very strongly predisposed to consider issues related to the correspondence between morally degenerate art and morally degenerate behavior in contemporary western culture almost exclusively from a contemporary western cultural perspective does kind of have some pretty serious disadvantages. Insofar as from a contemporary western cultural perspective, it's vaguely assumed to be primarily if not solely a contemporary western cultural phenomenon. The cause of which is vaguely assumed to be stuff like too much violence on television, and gangsta rap, and the adverse consequences of some kind of mythically widespread popular approach to parenting that encourages single working mothers to leave their children alone in the basement rec room for six to twelve hours a day with a Gameboy, two bags of Flamin' Hot Baked Cheeto cheese curls and a quart of soda pop. Or what have you.
Also, as far as I know, anyway, while there is some empirical data in support of there being such a correspondence, there isn't so much of it that you can pretty much take it as having been decisively proven.
I humbly submit that it might therefore be worth asking to what extent the scientific and social consensus on this subject might itself be influenced by eight or nine centuries worth of refractory cultural fall-out from a series of political, social, techological and economic developments between approximately the 11th and 16th centuries, including but not limited to the rise of the market town, and hence the burgher class (aka the proto-bourgeoisie, soon to become the non-proto-bourgeousie); the roughly contemporary (give or take a century or two) rise of the guilds (aka the skilled craftsman class) and hence the overall expansion in both the kind and number of non-luxury-edition manufactured goods to which the proto-middle and -working classes had comparatively widespread access and/or exposure, thus leading to a very slight blurring of formerly fixed and absolute class boundaries and eventually even some upward social mobility; the invention of the printing press (aka mass-cultural media technology in its earliest form) and hence eventually standardized national languages; oh, right, and before that, the establishment of the contemporary nation state; the gradual development of a partially trade-based national economy; the less gradual development of a largely trade and/or pillage-based Western economy during the age of exploration, and hence the concomitant overall across-the-board increase in general prosperity at every level of Western society (and hence, eventually, banking) that along with some other stuff resulted in:
The spread of both literacy and mass-produced secular literature written in non-dead, non-classical languages plus a wide variety of mass-produced visual art, including the approximate reproduction of fine art masterworks along with the corresponding widespread propagation of approximately the same aesthetic and scholastic values vested in the original, which is to say: aka the basically still intact foundation on which all subsequent layers of western culture up to and including contemporary western culture rest to this very day. Almost all of which occurred at a time when virtually no form of western culture and virtually no aspect of western society that had a chance of taking root anywhere on western soil that wasn't thoroughly and regularly tilled, tended, fertilized, or otherwise agriculturally-metaphored by the Roman Catholic Church, which was then in the mid-to-late stages of its imperial and administrative dominance over the whole of what's presently Western Europe. (With the exception of Lithuania.)
Because seriously. Just think for a moment. Would we really be sitting here having a virtual convo on the internet about the murder of four people by a fucked-up 20-year-old kid in which we all more or less just take it for granted that there's a decent realistic possibility that Satan did it, if contemporary western culture wasn't still a lot closer to some roots it may have lost touch with long ago but hasn't ever really lost?
I don't think we would. Personally. I also don't think that popular culture is a very significant contributing factor to acts of sociopathic violence. Apart from idiomatically.
My 9037 free-associative cents for the day.
_________________________
***
E quella a me: «Nessun maggior dolore
che ricordarsi del tempo felice
ne la miseria; e ciò sa ’l tuo dottore.
Ma s’a conoscer la prima radice
del nostro amor tu hai cotanto affetto,
dirò come colui che piange e dice.
Noi leggiavamo un giorno per diletto
di Lancialotto come amor lo strinse;
soli eravamo e sanza alcun sospetto.
Per più fïate li occhi ci sospinse
quella lettura, e scolorocci il viso;
ma solo un punto fu quel che ci vinse.
Quando leggemmo il disïato riso
esser basciato da cotanto amante,
questi, che mai da me non fia diviso,
la bocca mi basciò tutto tremante.
Galeotto fu ’l libro e chi lo scrisse:
quel giorno più non vi leggemmo avante».
on further edit: deleted surplus stanza i didn't notice got pasted in earlier.
