Reply #180: A reason to be suspicious of art and artists.

[tomreedtoon]

I know, a lot of you have all kinds of liberal arts training to believe that art is automatically good, and therefore artists always deserve respect. But you probably never understood what art really is.

Art is imposing a formal order upon existence.

The act of creating art is morally neutral. Any moral nature it has depends on the individual artist. There were people in Nazi Germany that created lamp shades out of the skin of murdered Jews. It was hideous. It was inhuman. But you could not claim that those creations weren't art.

I think most of the posts in this thread came from a lot of you people suddenly realizing that art is not always representative of the good. Congratulations. You've taken one more step towards understanding the world.