This article is from the source 'guardian' and was first published or seen on . It last changed over 40 days ago and won't be checked again for changes.
You can find the current article at its original source at http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/apr/15/trigger-warnings-art-daft-stephen-fry-caravaggio
The article has changed 2 times. There is an RSS feed of changes available.
Previous version
1
Next version
| Version 0 | Version 1 |
|---|---|
| A trigger warning on art? A daft idea – but a back-handed compliment | A trigger warning on art? A daft idea – but a back-handed compliment |
| (5 months later) | |
| Trigger warnings are a modern folktale, surely? The idea that a generation of students are demanding – in between marching against statues and banning Germaine Greer – to be warned about violent, sexual or otherwise threatening content in great works of art has, to someone who has not been on campus for years, a fictional quality. | Trigger warnings are a modern folktale, surely? The idea that a generation of students are demanding – in between marching against statues and banning Germaine Greer – to be warned about violent, sexual or otherwise threatening content in great works of art has, to someone who has not been on campus for years, a fictional quality. |
| When Stephen Fry caused offence this week with remarks about a victim culture that supposedly allows people to say “‘you can’t watch this play, you can’t watch Titus Andronicus, or you can’t read it in a Shakespeare class … because it’s got children being killed in it, it might trigger something when you were young that upset you once.” I was saying to myself, pull the other one. Just show me these colleges or theatres that would put a trigger warning on Titus Andronicus. It’s obviously all made up by free speech zealots who love to imagine an army of humourless freelance censors obsessed with closing down the mind. | When Stephen Fry caused offence this week with remarks about a victim culture that supposedly allows people to say “‘you can’t watch this play, you can’t watch Titus Andronicus, or you can’t read it in a Shakespeare class … because it’s got children being killed in it, it might trigger something when you were young that upset you once.” I was saying to myself, pull the other one. Just show me these colleges or theatres that would put a trigger warning on Titus Andronicus. It’s obviously all made up by free speech zealots who love to imagine an army of humourless freelance censors obsessed with closing down the mind. |
| Then the BBC put a warning on the art of Caravaggio. It turns out such warnings are real after all, and that they can indeed be applied by clumsy do-gooders to great art that was created several centuries ago. In reporting a news story about the possible discovery of a new work by Caravaggio, the BBC website has placed this prominent text just below the headline: “Warning: The paintings featured below depict a graphic image.” Short of actually saying, “this is a trigger warning”, this is a trigger warning. It gives web readers the opportunity to surf on before they risk being exposed to images of beheading. | Then the BBC put a warning on the art of Caravaggio. It turns out such warnings are real after all, and that they can indeed be applied by clumsy do-gooders to great art that was created several centuries ago. In reporting a news story about the possible discovery of a new work by Caravaggio, the BBC website has placed this prominent text just below the headline: “Warning: The paintings featured below depict a graphic image.” Short of actually saying, “this is a trigger warning”, this is a trigger warning. It gives web readers the opportunity to surf on before they risk being exposed to images of beheading. |
| Why has the BBC singled out the work of one of the greatest European artists as so potentially toxic and traumatic that it requires a graphic content warning? Caravaggio’s paintings hang in art galleries across Europe, with no warnings whatsoever. What is Auntie worried about? | Why has the BBC singled out the work of one of the greatest European artists as so potentially toxic and traumatic that it requires a graphic content warning? Caravaggio’s paintings hang in art galleries across Europe, with no warnings whatsoever. What is Auntie worried about? |
| In both his painting Judith and Holofernes that hangs in the Barberini Palace, Rome, and in the newly discovered picture of the same story – Caravaggio portrays a woman hacking off a man’s head with a sword. This grisly Bible story is visualised with acute, almost hallucinatory realism in Caravaggio’s Barberini masterpiece. As blood spurts from his opened throat (trigger warning!) the helpless Holofernes looks up, horribly conscious of what is happening. This is a horror story in paint. Caravaggio wants you to imagine what it feels like to be beheaded. | In both his painting Judith and Holofernes that hangs in the Barberini Palace, Rome, and in the newly discovered picture of the same story – Caravaggio portrays a woman hacking off a man’s head with a sword. This grisly Bible story is visualised with acute, almost hallucinatory realism in Caravaggio’s Barberini masterpiece. As blood spurts from his opened throat (trigger warning!) the helpless Holofernes looks up, horribly conscious of what is happening. This is a horror story in paint. Caravaggio wants you to imagine what it feels like to be beheaded. |
| Decapitation is Caravaggio’s favourite horror. It appears so frequently in his art and with such mesmerising conviction that it must surely have been his own worst nightmare. In his painting of The Beheading of John the Baptist the executioner has already cut through his victim’s throat and spinal column and is now grabbing his dagger to sever the last flap of skin. In his painting of the severed head of the Medusa spewing blood from the base of its skull, this snake-headed monster with a human face is, like Holofernes, acutely conscious of the situation. Even in his portrayal of Abraham about to sacrifice Isaac, the knife is poised to cut at the howling boy’s neck. In what may be his very last painting, Caravaggio gives the severed head of Goliath his own face: he pictures himself decapitated. | Decapitation is Caravaggio’s favourite horror. It appears so frequently in his art and with such mesmerising conviction that it must surely have been his own worst nightmare. In his painting of The Beheading of John the Baptist the executioner has already cut through his victim’s throat and spinal column and is now grabbing his dagger to sever the last flap of skin. In his painting of the severed head of the Medusa spewing blood from the base of its skull, this snake-headed monster with a human face is, like Holofernes, acutely conscious of the situation. Even in his portrayal of Abraham about to sacrifice Isaac, the knife is poised to cut at the howling boy’s neck. In what may be his very last painting, Caravaggio gives the severed head of Goliath his own face: he pictures himself decapitated. |
| When you come across these paintings in an art gallery or a church the effect is compulsive. Caravaggio is more real, more alive, more necessary than other artists. His images rip through the veil of complacency. That is surely why the BBC has put a trigger warning on them. | When you come across these paintings in an art gallery or a church the effect is compulsive. Caravaggio is more real, more alive, more necessary than other artists. His images rip through the veil of complacency. That is surely why the BBC has put a trigger warning on them. |
| Caravaggio lived in a violent world in which people did get beheaded in public. Sadly so do we. Beheading is not a thing of the past. Islamic State beheads prisoners and films their deaths. Lee Rigby was killed by terrorists who tried to behead him on a London street in 2013. Videos of Isis beheadings have circulated widely. It surely in this horrible modern context that some overscrupulous soul thought it best to put a trigger warning on Caravaggio. | Caravaggio lived in a violent world in which people did get beheaded in public. Sadly so do we. Beheading is not a thing of the past. Islamic State beheads prisoners and films their deaths. Lee Rigby was killed by terrorists who tried to behead him on a London street in 2013. Videos of Isis beheadings have circulated widely. It surely in this horrible modern context that some overscrupulous soul thought it best to put a trigger warning on Caravaggio. |
| Yet it cuts deeper. When I say Caravaggio is shocking in a museum, there is of course a protected cultural context to that shock. Museums are full of violent images, not just by him – there are so many paintings of Saint Sebastian being shot with arrows at short range and people being eaten by monsters, not to mention Jesus on the cross – but it is all ultimately uplifting. The museum makes everything beautiful: walk around the National Gallery looking at its goriest works and you will still leave with sense of profound cultural enrichment, just as, if you do actually watch Titus Andronicus or Macbeth performed by the RSC, you will leave on a linguistic, intellectual, and imaginative high. | Yet it cuts deeper. When I say Caravaggio is shocking in a museum, there is of course a protected cultural context to that shock. Museums are full of violent images, not just by him – there are so many paintings of Saint Sebastian being shot with arrows at short range and people being eaten by monsters, not to mention Jesus on the cross – but it is all ultimately uplifting. The museum makes everything beautiful: walk around the National Gallery looking at its goriest works and you will still leave with sense of profound cultural enrichment, just as, if you do actually watch Titus Andronicus or Macbeth performed by the RSC, you will leave on a linguistic, intellectual, and imaginative high. |
| If museums make everything beautiful, the internet makes everything ugly. High culture mixes with the most disturbing trash. In 2013 Facebook decided to allow beheading videos after temporarily banning them: psychologists warn against the long-term effects of watching such videos but some people want to see them anyway. What’s the difference between a Caravaggio painting and a video of a real life decapitation if both are just a few clicks from each other online? It is almost possible to sympathise with the nervous BBC monitor of morals who slapped that warning on Judith and Holofernes. | If museums make everything beautiful, the internet makes everything ugly. High culture mixes with the most disturbing trash. In 2013 Facebook decided to allow beheading videos after temporarily banning them: psychologists warn against the long-term effects of watching such videos but some people want to see them anyway. What’s the difference between a Caravaggio painting and a video of a real life decapitation if both are just a few clicks from each other online? It is almost possible to sympathise with the nervous BBC monitor of morals who slapped that warning on Judith and Holofernes. |
| But their mistake is to fail to look hard enough. Look at the pain in Judith’s eyes as she contemplates her own violent work. Look deeper into the anguish of Holofernes as he died. Caravaggio – and Shakespeare – are the very opposite of pornographers of violence. Great art does not get off on violence. It portrays it in order to understand the extremes of human suffering. If Shakespeare did not show Macbeth’s crimes, he could not take us into the guilty mind of a murderer, nor get us to the desperate understanding of Macbeth’s last speeches. Caravaggio’s beheadings reveal the cruelty of the violent world we still live in. They do not add to that cruelty, but offer the catharsis of tragic art. | But their mistake is to fail to look hard enough. Look at the pain in Judith’s eyes as she contemplates her own violent work. Look deeper into the anguish of Holofernes as he died. Caravaggio – and Shakespeare – are the very opposite of pornographers of violence. Great art does not get off on violence. It portrays it in order to understand the extremes of human suffering. If Shakespeare did not show Macbeth’s crimes, he could not take us into the guilty mind of a murderer, nor get us to the desperate understanding of Macbeth’s last speeches. Caravaggio’s beheadings reveal the cruelty of the violent world we still live in. They do not add to that cruelty, but offer the catharsis of tragic art. |
| Stephen Fry was wrong to chastise people who want to be protected from great art. It can be frightening, grotesque and extreme. Trigger warnings on Shakespeare and Caravaggio are daft yet also perceptive, for they recognise the power of art even as they try to censor it. What a marvellous backhanded compliment to great art, to still be offended by it after all these years. | Stephen Fry was wrong to chastise people who want to be protected from great art. It can be frightening, grotesque and extreme. Trigger warnings on Shakespeare and Caravaggio are daft yet also perceptive, for they recognise the power of art even as they try to censor it. What a marvellous backhanded compliment to great art, to still be offended by it after all these years. |
Previous version
1
Next version