The Art of Cruelty, Maggie Nelson
The Art of Cruelty, Maggie Nelson
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The Art of Cruelty
A Reckoning

Author: Maggie Nelson

Narrator: Tavia Gilbert

Unabridged: 8 hr 49 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 02/21/2017


Synopsis

Today both reality and entertainment crowd our fields of vision with brutal imagery. The pervasiveness of images of torture, horror, and war has all but demolished the twentieth-century hope that such imagery might shock us into a less alienated state, or aid in the creation of a just social order. What to do now? When to look, when to turn away?

Genre-busting author Maggie Nelson brilliantly navigates this contemporary predicament, with an eye to the question of whether or not focusing on representations of cruelty makes us cruel. In a journey through high and low culture (Kafka to reality TV), the visual to the verbal (Paul McCarthy to Brian Evenson), and the apolitical to the political (Francis Bacon to Kara Walker), Nelson offers a model of how one might balance strong ethical convictions with an equally strong appreciation for work that tests the limits of taste, taboo, and permissibility.

About Maggie Nelson

Maggie Nelson is a poet, critic, and award-winning author of The Argonauts, Bluets, The Art of Cruelty, Jane: A Murder, and The Red Parts. She lives in Los Angeles, California.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Thomas on July 05, 2016

3.5 stars A thorough, disturbing, and intelligent book about cruelty and how we interact with it today. Maggie Nelson addresses an ambitious set of questions: with so many images of war, torture, and horror available to us, how do we best process such media to motivate us to act? Why do we draw such......more

Goodreads review by Rob on February 08, 2023

I was excited to read this book after reading the laudatory review on the cover of the New York Times Book Review, but honestly I found "The Art Of Cruelty" a bit of a disappointment. In part this is due to the fact that I was most interested in reading a critique of cruelty as it is manifested in c......more

Goodreads review by Adam on May 31, 2016

Sharp, well-thought-out, relevant survey of cruelty in 20th century art, centering loosely on Artaud and engaging with questions of artistic obligations w/r/t torture, pain, and brutality. Nelson has a bad habit of over-praising her source material (everything is either "justly famous" or "iconic" o......more

Goodreads review by Viv on July 30, 2017

In this collection of essays, Maggie Nelson looks at the role of cruelty and violence in art and poses ethical questions surrounding that topic. Her examples take in fine art, poetry, performance art, dance, film, photography and television and her criticism has a feminist and Buddhist slant. These......more