Detrimental Art: Shocking for shock’s sake

A couple of days back, on my way home from a childhood friend’s apartment. I got onto the Northern Line train, I picked up a folded Evening Standard placed on the air conditioner. ”Stay Clear of the doors please” the automated voice repeated, then the doors shut and we headed for Highbury and Islington from Seven Sisters train station.

As I flipped through the pages of the newspaper, a story caught my eyes in a column about art exhibitions. A few days ago, a controversial painting of the Virgin Mary went on auction in London and a world record set as it went for a whooping £2.8 million.

The art impression was made with pornographic images and Elephant dung. The art was the creation of Christopher Ofili, 46, an extremely talented English Artist. That, no one can take from him. He won the Turner prize in 1998, which is an outstanding achievement for his hard and brilliant work over the years.

Now here is the problem, I am a writer and I can write whatever I like due to freedom of speech. But I am still bound by certain morals which shape my perspectives as an individual consequentially affecting the way and what I write about.

This article is not about how much that art work was purchased for, wealthy people get what they want, it’s one of the perks of being wealthy. We assume wealthy people spend huge amounts on frivolities, but if you are not wealthy you can’t say for sure what you would do since you and I have never been in that state of affluence.

Anyone could write a derogatory ode aimed at Buddha, without any consequences whatsoever. But what would be the purpose of undertaking such a futile task? Would it be to create a temporary buzz which would ultimately infuriate the Buddha sect.

A writer-friend of mine who is a Roman Catholic, told me he felt highly disappointed in the taste of that particular art work of the Virgin Mary. He described it as a perversion of what some people hold dear just because it can be done.

I believe freedom of speech for all is a fundamental human right which we are born with and we don’t need permission from anyone to exercise it. But I find it impossible to wrap my head around the motivating factor of a creative person intentionally infuriating a group of people in order to express their art.

Every biologically active man above puberty, appreciates a female twerking video to an extent. But when videos of twerking under-age kids go viral on the internet one begins to wonder who the parents of these kids are. In some of the videos you can hear some mothers edging their daughters on (N.B Skin colour is totally irrelevant) ”Do it for the gram, Do it for the gram, Go Keisha, Go Keisha”. Or that music video that tells you to shoot another Man ”I’ll drop a Nigga real quick” or the other one suggesting that young men go into drug dealing as mules ”Young Nigga move dat dope”.

All these of these depictions suggest that art is on a steady decline in a wrong dimension. These days, instead of art being soul food to us, a great chunk of it is now a mankind moral-fibre destroying tool.