Morality and the Artist: Toward an Ethics of Art (original) (raw)
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Artists and Morality: Toward an Ethics of Art
Leonardo, 1977
Leonardo, Vol. 10, pp. 195-202. Pergamon Press 1977. Printed in Great Britain ... Abstract-The author distinguishes and explores a number of moral questions raised by the social influence of artistic activity. He begins by claiming that the moral discussion of art actually centres ...
MORALITY, SOCIETY, AND THE LOVE OF ART
The principal focus of the essay is the idea of artistic value, understood as the value of a work of art as the work of art it is, and the essay explores the connections, if any, between artistic value and a variety of other values (social, moral, educational, and character-building) in human life. I start with a series of observations about social values and then turn to moral values. Beginning from Goethe's claim that 'music cannot affect morality, nor can the other arts, and it would be wrong to expect them to do so' , I proceed from music through the other arts; I distinguish different conceptions of morality; I highlight what I call a work of art's positive moral value (its power for moral improvement); and I distinguish three kinds of moral improvement, one taking pride of place. My conclusion is that the positive moral value of works of art has been greatly overrated. I then return to the social values of art, looking at the situation from a very different point of view and reaching new conclusions, some of them positive. I end by explaining why my observations and arguments about the positive moral value of a work of art in no way diminishes the importance of art in human life, the true end of art having an importance in human life not guaranteed by morality.
In the nowadays acknowledged moral crisis in/of art, a split has occurred between the public and some artistic manifestations. Stuck in the so called "radical actionism"-as the artistic short and violent movement developed by Fluxus Group during 1960-1970, with origins in the "Viennese Actionism"-, the art segment dealing with contemporaneity, disputing the traditional art as well as social and moral conventions, has created a new area of expression, in which art and life converge, arising questions that go beyond the aesthetic experience, and managing to introduce an ethical dimension in artistic expression. In a plurality of theoretical and practical concerns, the contemporary art has produced repeated attacks on human dignity or animal life. So, the present art manifestations may include people, animals, corps/thereof parts (human or animal), explicit sexual images, psychological abuses as well as references to self-harm. A balance between art and morality, a ...
Wrong to Exhibit: Insights from Moral Psychology for the Art-from-Artist Problem
Moral Psychology: Preliminary Investigations into Our Ethical World, 2021
This chapter synthesizes recent discourses around the ethical evaluations of art in light of "separating the art from the artist." While "art" encompasses many media, such as painting, music, literature, and film, the paper predominantly focuses on painters and photographers. I respond primarily to the theories of receptive and process-based art ethics discussed recently by Ted Nannicelli and James Harold (2020). I also explore art creation and appreciation through concepts of moral psychology, especially those related to moral motivation, moral luck, immoral imagination, and the role of emotions in moral judgments. I do not prescribe what one should do with "problematic" art and artists but rather elucidate moral psychological approaches for these questions and offer suggestions for their implementation. The implications of this study hold for both historically and currently famous artists, albeit with nuances for each.
Art’s Rich Contribution to Ethics
Paul Macneill (ed.) Ethics and the Arts. Amsterdam: Springer, 2014
This book is a collection of invited essays on Ethics and the Arts. Most of the chapters were written without each author being familiar with other chapters and there is (unsurprisingly) a range of different approaches taken. Nevertheless, there is also a considerable degree of coherence between the chapters, which I aim to bring out in this concluding chapter. My further aim is to examine the ways (in the particularities of each chapter) in which the arts can, and do, make a major contribution to ethics. As discussed briefly in the Introduction, I consider that the relationship between ethics and the arts is two-way. In this book, ethical concerns are discussed within the arts—but so too is ethics considered from the vantage point of the arts. In this chapter I take up this idea from both angles, in discussing the approaches taken by various authors toward ethics within their artform, as well as in drawing insights from the discussions of various ideas, art theories and practices, and a range of other disciplines, that may offer broader understandings of ethics. There are ethical issues that concern artists and a good many of them have been captured in chapters of this book. This concluding chapter is organised around the ethical issues I have drawn from the preceding chapters and these are represented by the sub-headings below. Included (for example) are: ‘intercultural issues in making art’; and ‘art as an alternative approach to understanding ethics.’ In compiling this book I have been particularly interested in the last of these: drawing understandings about ethics from the arts, and applying these in ways that may enrich our understanding of ethics more broadly.
MORAL RIGHTS AND IMMORAL ARTISTS
The word 'moral' used to denote upright behaviour and 'moral' to denote certain authorial rights (droit moral), are homonyms: the things signified by the same signifier are different. Because Germany's moral rights equivalent is the personality right (Persönlichkeitsrecht), the German language does not permit the wordplay employed in the title. Nevertheless, this paper argues that personhood (Persönlichkeit), which is intertwined with the fundamental human rights principle of respect for equal and inherent human dignity, is the critical consideration for both understanding moral rights and engaging with the vexed issue of artworks created by immoral artists. This paper, which should be read as a sample of ongoing research, therefore approaches moral rights from a personhood perspective in order to construct analytical tools for engaging with immoral artists and their artworks.
works and arts. Its main aim is to underscore the correlation of art and morality and to analyze, contrast , and interpret the functions, meaning ,sense and applications of art in different time or period. This Article is prepared by reviewing the period and time of English literature related to these issues.
The Frontiers of Ethical Transgressions in Contemporary Art
Art and morality share a complex, almost paradoxical, intersection of interests; often an offence levied against one is offered the possibility of acceptance in the another. But art is not created in an environment of isolation; they are to a certain extent bound by the rules of society, the socio-cultural space of whose landscape it utilises for its creation, reception and preservation. And the moral codes of the society are often guilty of cultural relativism and religious or historical dogmatism. Hence, neither the fair practice of Art without any moral obligations nor social ethics without consideration for artistic freedom can be accepted when theorising a rationally founded cultural utopia. The present paper engages with the particular issue of animal treatment in contemporary artistic practices to rear further insights on the legitimacy of using moral standards as an evaluatory framework to judge art objects and the aesthetic value of 'immoral' art.