#against morality

‘The current obsession with flattening culture, the attachment to simple moralizing, the deadening of art, are all features of what I call “Liberal Realism”,’ McLaughlin contends. ‘Like Social Realism before it, Liberal Realism is the product of a culture that demands its ideology be unambiguously reflected in its art.’ She describes the present as ‘a time when, across the political spectrum, identity is capital and culture is shaped by competing claims of victimhood’. By dictating what to value in art, this moralizing tendency doesn’t just diminish aesthetic experience, it stifles our capacity to engage with the irreducible messiness of being alive. In doing so, it risks reducing morality itself to a state- or market-controlled instrument.

"Every era finds in the past those things that it craves, and the meaning of art necessarily changes through time. To stop this from happening is neither possible nor desirable.

"One of the most striking facets of this attachment to goodness is the desire for art to transform itself into something more obviously socially useful, in order to prove its value: to become activism, community-oriented architecture, archive, outreach, social work, legal advocacy. Sometimes, the space that the fine arts are able to provide for such projects results in creative responses to real-world issues. Forensic Architecture's reconstructions of war crimes and investigations into the abuses of governments, for example, have been used to prosecute human rights violations. But for every project that contributes something of note, there are countless instances of art as activism or advocacy that fetishize social justice, and whose usefulness to the people they purportedly serve is far less clear than the desire to uphold a fantasy of the artist as guardian angel of community cohesion."