Extremity and Art

(From Black Oak Presents - Summer 2010 - coming June 1)

By Michael Kleen

A few weeks ago, a young man with a certain “edge” approached me on Facebook, hyping his magazine with promises of an open war on “politically correct horror,” seeking the voice of the “new Angry Young Man or Angry Young Woman.” He attacked a friend’s publication, accusing it of not being “dark” enough. In the contemporary horror scene, it appears that “badder is better,” and like thrash metal, its sole purpose has become one-upmanship—plot, character development, and interesting settings be damned.

But the idea that any artistic pursuit ought to be more offensive and more extreme than the last loses sight of the real purpose of art. We have long used art to question, to inspire, to reflect, and to arouse the passions. Sometimes, offending a viewer, listener, or reader is inevitable—a byproduct of the original intent. But what happens when the purpose of a work of art is to offend, or to simply “be extreme”? The end result is not art, but something else. The artist has confused the consequence for the purpose. Or, as the late Peter Steele of Type O Negative once said, “Functionless art is simply tolerated vandalism.”

At the root of this rat race to be the most offensive and the most extreme is nihilism—a disgust with life and a desire for destruction. At the risk of sounding like an art snob, that is not art, it is merely the annihilation of form and content for the sake of it; an outward manifestation of the frustrations of an adolescent stuck in an artist’s body. Does it also stem from a yearning for attention? Perhaps.

To be an artist requires skill and, some would say, a bit of talent. The ability to put words to a page does not make someone a writer any more than the ability to strum a guitar makes someone a musician. People who want to make it in the music business by emulating Jim Morrison’s bizarre behavior do not realize how many hours of practice he put into his art, how many failures he overcame, and how much suffering he endured.  Likewise, one cannot just do a bunch of drugs and become a writer like Hunter S. Thompson. Morrison and Thompson’s extremity was a byproduct of their work—not their purpose or original intent.

This is my plea to my fellow artists, writers, and musicians—understand why you want to create and make your goal the perfection of your art. Extremity for the sake of extremity is destructive, not creative, and creation is the foundation of all true art.

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