by Akim Reinhardt
Art is dangerous. It’s time people remembered that and recognized the fullness of it. For if art is to remain important or even relevant in the current moment, then it’s long past time artists stopped flashing dull claws and pretending they had what it takes to slice through ignorance. We need them swallow their feel-good clichés and to begin sharpening their blades. We need dangerous art, and we cannot afford much more art that its creators believe is dangerous when it is not.
When people say Art is dangerous, they’re often bragging. Talking it up like a super hero. Evil had better beware: Art is here to save the day!
Oh my, she gasped, clutching her pearls. Why, how could art possibly do that?
Because it’s dangerous! It reveals the evil that masked villains seek to hide!
Such sentiments are naive. They are wishful thinking. And those sentiments are actually far more dangerous than the art typically produced by those who espouse such sentimets. Supposedly dangerous art often does little more than preach to the choir or wrap important points up in obfuscations that most audiences lack the inclination or even the background to unravel. Instead of puncturing sacred cows or shining a bright light on dark evils, much “dangerous” art merely creates illusions of damage amid billows of self-congratulation and self-satisfaction. When the smoke clears, all the same problems remain, and no one, save for perhaps professionals and other insiders of various art worlds, are any more enlightened, while the problems that had been targeted with “dangerous” art quietly and stubbornly linger. Read more »
Death was already about me. I’d recently written two death songs. Not mournful, but peaceful and welcoming. No reason. They just seeped out of me. Then came the Covid infection. It must’ve found me in upstate New York while vacationing with friends.