slomo » Mon Nov 21, 2016 8:57 pm wrote: God forbid if we should criticize anything labeled "art", because that would be philistine of us. Even the most shocking, degrading depiction of ultimate horror, if done by the right people in the right setting, is suddenly excused because it's "art". How dare you judge them!
It seems clear to me that there's an overlap between the kind of creative self-expression that's attempting to process unconscious trauma and resolve it, and the kind that's feeding it and feeding off of it.
Occult style ritual abuse is the dark side of "creative self-expression" (destructive self-repression?), but it still has a creative/theatrical component and it's fueled by the same unconscious trauma content as dark fairy tales or cathartic works of art like, uh, well at this point I honestly don't know what to safely cite, but it's probably a mistake to try and argue that it's all indulgence in/cover for dark deSadian desires. Also, bright flowers and honey bees love & light stuff isn't necessarily any less pernicious, so far as distorting reality and providing a cloak for depravity goes.
I think what determines how pernicious any given artwork might be is how congruent the outer form and style is with the inner process of the artist, how aligned the product with the intent. If an artist (my brother comes to mind) uses his own creative self-expression process to generate products that provide him with social currency, then the truly cathartic aspect is going to be compromised by that; eventually he may become a kind of Dorian Gray artist, a pretender, for whom exploring the dark is not a way to shed light on it, but a way to gain power from it. Those are the artists who are recruited to serve the social agendas and whose work is promoted as delivery devices for the desired narratives and values. Weird how this idea would be seen as loony tunes at a place like RI.
It'd be nice to think gauging pure art from impure is as easy as relying on one's own aesthetic responses (I like Dionyso's doodles; I found Djurojevic's works repugnant); but that'd be kind of like basing who are the most or least likely celebrity pedophiles on how likable they are (they're actors, right)? Why assume art can't be mastered with the same lack of integrity or honesty as science, religion, or magick can be? We tend to think good art can only come from a deep soul-place, and overall I think RI's avant-guard line of art-defenders is good evidence of how thoroughly we've been conned and co-opted by Art, big A.
All that said, I don't see much in the way of art (barring those artists cited here) in Pizzagate; at best, it's people making fun of child trafficking and having a lark pretending to be satanic child rapists and murderers. Which would be pretty weird, specially for Washington elite; but I suppose these days nothing can be ruled out.