Joe K. Post 7

Joe Kelly

"Monkey see, monkey do" has been a popular argument among conservatives in American politics for quite some time now, and they've certainly been effective in convincing the public. It has gotten to the point that our cultural interests are now simply assumed by media outlets to have a significant contributing effect on our actions: after the Columbine shootings, their was an outcry against Marilyn Manson when it was found that he was a staple of the killers' CD collections; their have been a slew of violent teenage crimes attributed to the imitation of both wrestling and violent video games such as Grand Theft Auto; and of course, there were the congressional debates about NEA funding and Robert Mapplethorpe. The strength of the causal connection between what we see in popular culture and do ourselves may be debated; however, it seems to be a rather one-sided debate these days.

The growing consensus on this question certainly had an effect on the Mapplethorpe case. In fact, it would not be going too far to say that it was the central issue of the debates. The question of funding was a red herring: NEA funding constitutes a miniscule percentage of the budget, nothing at all when compared with military spending. Still, disputing the allocation of NEA funds allowed politicians to dispute what was, in reality, their central point: will the creation of this art or similar to art have a negative effect on our nation's morals? This question, itself seems to be based on the dispute over the meaning of these works.

To those who wish to ban these works, just the depiction of actions of a sexual nature serves as advocacy, or at least tacit encouragement, of the acts portrayed. To the other side of the debate, the dynamic between visual stimulus and action is not quite so simple. One may look to a wealth of historical evidence to see that not all artistic portrayal is positive. Photos of the horrors war and of poverty, for instance, rarely aim to assign positive connotations to their subjects. Even when a portrayal of circumstances is not decidedly negative, it will not have such a straightforward impact on society as many would believe.

Certainly, images have an effect on people that is more visceral, and in many ways, deeper than that created by text. Though written ideas may have a higher capacity for sophistication, people do not always grasp their abstraction in a practical sense until they see them in the concrete, with their own eyes. Images serve to do just that. However, that does not mean that their messages make such an incredibly profound connection with the minds of individuals that they are automatically accepted as fact.

Art, like other mediums, should put forth two messages. One is its essential purpose, specific to an individual work, the meaning that the artist wished to attribute to it. The other is present in all art, and that message is that its first meaning, which the artist intends to put forth, should be evaluated by the viewer, in terms of the context of the viewer's world. Often, the art aims to even challenge this context, and if it does make such an attempt, the viewer should be willing to critically evaluate that work's claims. It is, in fact, this constant evaluation of not just the art, but the world around us, that is essential; for if we are unwilling to examine the context that form our beliefs, how are we to know whether our evaluations, based on these beliefs, are correct?