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The Art Of Cruelty: A Reckoning (2011)

by Maggie Nelson(Favorite Author)

4.14 of 5 Votes: 5

ISBN

0393072150 (ISBN13: 9780393072150)

languge

English

genre

Poetry

publisher

W. W. Norton & Company

review 1: This is a really incredibly book. It's written brilliantly, comprehensively, poetically, personally, and with impressive organization. Nelson examines an array of art that is cruel, exploring meat, death, cannibalism, terrorism, rape, and other horrors of human life. She analyzes film, sculpture, performance art, literature, and political news. Her skill at selecting key passages and fragments of all of these works is astounding, and she brings us to unsettling and possibly redemptive places as viewers, as witnesses, as humans. She includes some wonderful quotes from John Waters as well. I wish I had read this while writing my dissertation. I'd recommend it to my nihilist friends, to my freshman art students, to people I don't like. She is an excellent wr... moreiter.
review 2: Nelson takes as a starting point Artaud's Theatre of Cruelty and explores its relevancy in a world where representations of spectacular violence are commonplace. Focusing on contemporary or modern artists such as Bacon, Krueger and Abramovic, filmmakers like Michael Haneke and writers like Kafka and Plath, Nelson presents a panoramic view across disciplines of the meanings and uses of works that use violence to disturb and unsettle us so profoundly as to preclude the return to everyday life unchanged or untransformed. At once a profound meditation on violence, art and the representation of the corporeality of the human body, and a grippingly relatable analysis of artwork Nelson finds personally transformative or transgressive, this is a highly prescient, thought-provoking and necessary work. Loved it. less

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