Among the many other titles I could have given this post—including "The Stupidity of Bureaucrats"—I think the one I chose expresses the kernal of truth in two stories from the Times that happened to juxtapose themselves in my mind. I'll mention them in the order I read them and maybe that will recreate the experience at some level.
The first story, is about a chalk artist with a BFA, James de la Vega, busted for drawing illegally on the side of a building. His prior conviction was a mistake, because he'd been given permission to do the mural he was engaged in when the cops busted him, but by the time the building owner got to him, he'd already been booked and arraigned. Apparently there is no appeal from graffiti crimes. Since this is the artist's second offense, he could do 30 days in jail. Most of his local Harlem community doesn't consider his work graffiti and much of it is commissioned by local residents. He has his own gallery on Lexington at 104th Street. [Gothamist also has a post about this, with lots of juicy comments.]
On the surface, this looks like a "quality of life" crime, like busting guys pissing in the subway. Considering the quality of de la Vega's work and his personal demographics, I think what's really bothering the very priggish sounding prosecutor is not just the act, but the locations and the content: "'Beauty magazines make my girlfriend feel ugly,' penned on the sides of fitness clubs on the Lower East Side. Or, 'The best remedy for a cheap person is to have him pay for everything,' scrawled on banks and expensive restaurants near Wall Street. . . . a 5-by-7-foot mural of Fidel Castro smoking a cigar and wearing a Yankees cap [and a Che Guevara T-shirt], with the caption, 'Even Fidel Is a Yankee.'" De la Vega has also done a Guernica-like mural in East Harlem called "Slaves of our Past and Present." (Colin Powell and John Negroponte had the tapestry version of Guernica covered behind them at their press conference at the UN announcing the decision to invade Iraq.) As good art does, it challenges the status quo, twists reality just a little bit to a different, largely unheard point of view. Like Diego Rivera's murals (including the one destroyed by Nelson Rockefeller), it's not "nice" art.
Of course, one man's art is another man's graffiti, too, and apparently only certain groups of people get to define what art is, or when art is allowed to exist and in what form. Which leads into the second story, which is an op-ed piece by Michael Chabon, about a student at at the San Francisco Academy of Art University who wrote an American Psycho-esque story for a freshman creative writing seminar there, and subsequently got himself expelled and his instructor, Jan Richman, fired (or "non-renewed" as one says of adjuncts). The story rose out of an assignment to read David Foster Wallace's "The Girl with Curious Hair," and was apparently very bloody and vivid and disturbing enough that Richman asked for advice in how to deal with it in class. A fellow instructor suggested assigning the first chapter of Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones by way of contrast, to illustrate the difference between gratuitous and necessary goriness. Eventually, however, the student was ratted out to the cops by the administration, who investigated, had him profiled by a criminal profiler (which came to nothing and was not even an open homicide investigation), and shipped home to Seattle. Richman was told to gather character references from her colleagues, and then fired mid-year. (Better yet, no one in the administration had even heard of David Foster Wallace.)
SFGate covered the full story, but Chabon's op-ed piece is what I drew the title of this post from. It's basically a defense of the dark places that artists and writers (and teenagers) go to in the creation of work. Chabon writes:
The destructive impulse is universal among children of all ages, rises to a peak of vividness, ingenuity and fascination in adolescence, and thereafter never entirely goes away. Violence and hatred, and the fear of our own inability to control them in ourselves [my emphasis], are a fundamental part of our birthright, along with altruism, creativity, tenderness, pity and love. It therefore requires an immense act of hypocrisy to stigmatize our young adults and teenagers as agents of deviance and disorder. It requires a policy of dishonesty about and blindness to our own histories, as a species, as a nation, and as individuals who were troubled as teenagers, and who will always be troubled, by the same dark impulses.
The First Amendment issues are obvious and don't need mentioning here, since Chabon defines them quite eloquently without any help from me. What resonated with me was the line I emphasized in the quotation above, and it did so because I've written some fairly dark pieces myself. The first one I wrote, which explores the kind of training Special Forces units receive, scared the hell out of me; it was hard to admit that I could actually imagine the brutality I was writing about, harder still to imagine people did this kind of stupid crap to each other for a supposedly higher good. I don't think most people imagine their tax dollars are paying for this kind of thing, any more than they imagine what's really going on at Guantanamo Bay.
But the point is that someone is always imagining it and a small number of people, some of them supported by your tax dollars, are actually doing these things. If reported on in the media, they don't seem to make much of an impression because they're dismissed as propaganda of the "liberal media." Art, however, seems to get people's attention in a hurry. It disturbs them, offends them, annoys them, scares them. Whether it can make them think is another matter. As Dorothy Parker said, "You can lead a horticulture but you can't make her think."
Chabon is writing primarily about the over-protective impulse to maintain the innocence of children (and this student was hardly a child), but I think part of the issue here is that art is another way to wake people up, and to explore what happens when you go into those dark places. When you do, there are two choices: you can indulge them, or you can rein them in. Making art out of them is a way of reining them in. Sure words and images are powerful but art never killed anyone, except metaphorically.
Mystery/SF writer George C. Chesbro has a character named Veil Kendry whose only way of dealing with his own violent impulses is to paint what he sees in his vivid and lucid dreams. Isn't it better to pick up a pen or a brush or a piece of chalk than a knife or a gun?
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