Daisy Dixon on Whether Art Can Be Immoral

Dixon distinguishes five categories of depraved art: works that depict something immoral, works that cause immoral acts in consumers, works made by an artist of immoral character, works that embody an immoral perspective, and works produced through unethical means. She stresses that falling into one category does not automatically mean the artwork embodies that immoral property.

Dixon argues that whether a depicted act was historically considered immoral, such as homosexuality in Victorian England, does not make the art depraved, since moral judgments can themselves be mistaken. She cites the banning of Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness as a case where art was wrongly condemned as obscene.

Dixon explains that Plato worried realistic theatrical performances could induce viewers to copy the emotions and behavior depicted, due to a belief in art's quasi-magical power. She connects this ancient worry to modern concerns about video game realism shaping real-world attitudes and behavior.

Dixon describes how an artwork's form, composition, and symbolism can invite viewers to adopt a particular, sometimes oppressive, attitude toward its subject matter, as in Anne Eaton's feminist reading of Titian's Rape of Europa, where the painting eroticizes Europa's abduction for a male viewer. She contrasts this with Nabokov's Lolita, where the author presents an immoral perspective without endorsing it.

Dixon rejects the death-of-the-author view and defends a contextualist position where an artist's identity and the circumstances of production determine properties of the artwork, though not exhaustively. She uses Arthur Danto's thought experiment of identical red canvases with different creative histories to show that context, not appearance, fixes an artwork's properties.

Dixon distinguishes easy cases, where an artist's immoral attitudes are directly embedded in the work, such as Gauguin's eroticized paintings of the Tahitian girls he abused, from harder cases like Hitler's landscape paintings, where the immoral ideology shows up more subtly in stylistic choices. She argues that in extreme hard cases, like an abstract painting by a depraved artist, the artwork's meaning may not be determined by the artist's character at all.

Dixon argues, following Ted Nannicelli, that if an artwork's production process involved unethical acts, such as harming animals, that becomes a genuine property of the work even if imperceptible to viewers. She discusses Kim Jones burning rats in a performance piece and raises the consequentialist question of whether an artwork's value can outweigh the harm caused in making it.

Dixon argues against banning depraved art because censorship has historically been used to silence dissent and marginalized voices, often targeting works that merely subvert convention rather than being genuinely immoral. She favors counter-speech, making more art in response, as a better remedy than suppression.