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" or "important" and often they are NONE of these things) that became more grating as I read on, and also has a frustrating fixation on a couple of figures (Francis Bacon, Brian Evenson) who never quite

The kind of inaccessible high-modernist academic theorising that could cozily co-exist with a fascist world, despite its liberal bleating. A book that fascists would not be bothered to burn.

"I go down to the bookstore and skim shiny new memoir jacket after shiny new memoir jacket, until my mind starts to blur with blurb-speak testifying to each writer's brutal honesty, which is usually a close cousin of his or her "searing" or "unsentimental" prose, which, to be truly praiseworthy and dazzling, must also somehow shimmer onto the page "without a drop of self-pity." I wander out of the bookstore wondering, Is honesty paired with brutality a more winning, or at least a more marketable...

i'm a little biased in this rating, because the art of cruelty is pretty much custom-made for me. nelson's obsessions - violence, empathy, representation, gender, horror, community, politics - are virtually identical to my own. she likes a lot of the same art as me too (ana mendieta, william pope l., paul mc carthy) - and even hates some of the same stuff (funny games, for example). in addition, she writes in a personal, theoretical-but-accessible style not unlike rebecca solnit or susan sontag

3.5 starsA 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 pleasure from gory video games and humiliating reality television shows? How do we separate cruelty and violence - and can cruelty coexist with love? Nelson alludes to a plethora of performance artist...

I went into this book with certain expectations and finished it in a completely different place. When Nelson titled her book "The Art of Cruelty" she emphasized the "art" part. The majority of the book discusses performance art and the nature of its interaction with us as spectators. One example I found particularly thought provoking was her examination of Yoko Ono's performance of "Cut Piece", where Ono sits silently on the stage with a pair of scissors in front of her. The audience is free t

Maggie Nelson writes:Even if and when Santiago Sierra’s diagnoses are spot-on, the pity he has expressed toward his subjects gives me pause, and evaporates whatever interest in the work I might have otherwise been able to muster. For this pity doesn’t just stand behind the scenes; it also structures the forms of the artwork at hand. As he told the BBC about 10 people paid to masturbate, “Nobody said no and for me that was very tough. When I made this piece I would go to bed crying.” It’s one thi...

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 essays certainly gave food for thought but I didn't enjoy this book as much as the other of hers I have read and loved (The Argonauts). At times, I found this one slightly rambling and repetitive.

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 contemporary visual and performance art, and it turns out the focus of this work is much broader. This is a very personal, subjective work of criticism, most heavily informed by the author's obvious af...

My frustration with Maggie Nelson is highlighted more than ever in this book, she is SO trapped within academia and every time she gets even a little bit close to confronting that, she just recedes back into it. This book is incredibly inaccessible unless you've spent a significant amount of time reading within the academic institution's rigid, unrelenting canon. Her argument in this book, which isn't at all really CLEAR at any point, is completely entrenched in "how many obscure niche performan...

i really enjoyed this -- tho 1 part im confused abt / take issue with. she talks about "daddy" where plath compares the doings of her father to those of the nazi regime, and addresses the indignation of jewish critics re: this poem, and while she makes an interesting point that plath wasn't necessarily drawing equivalencies (tho maggie nelson doesnt offer any alternatives), her ultimate point asks, "And why ring the 'appropriateness' alarm, when the injunction to behave appropriately--as both Pl...

This was incredibly eye-opening, but a little flawed.It was so satisfying to have someone take on the old avant garde tactic of "shock the audience out of their complacency" with skepticism. Nelson takes it as her premise that art that explores/practices cruelty typically uses this as its justification, and she roundly critiques it. Dismantles it, really: with many many examples from visual art, performance/body art, writing, film and more, she is able to dissect effective and interesting uses o...

I admire Maggie Nelson for the way she approaches her subject: art (painting, writing, cinema, dance, performance art) that either employs cruelty (to the art-maker or to the audience) or depicts it. She is curious, unafraid of being or seeming "too interested," yet at the same time ready to tell us when her ethics are offended or her gorge rises. It's true: much art either courts or skirts or revels in cruelty. Does that make it offensive or bad? Clearly Nelson doesn't think so, but she also do...

I am profoundly more knowledgeable and disturbed since reading this book. Highly recommended.

Nelson's book provides a context not just for the cruelty of Hollywood and television (a subject already overwrought and boring), but takes the reader into the realm of art intended to 'better' the bourgeois through its graphic nature. She's skeptical of the notion of being scared or shocked into knowledge. Because I see a rape on film or in art, does that make me more empathetic to cases of the crime in general? Does seeing atrocities or torture 'improve' me? Nelson argues that these notions pr...

REVIEWMaggie Nelson has become one of my favorite writers: intelligent, with beautiful prose written with precision, personal yet always aware and tending to the larger picture. To review a work such as The Art of Cruelty is a daunting effort. The book is extremely complex and dense. It examines what art is as much as the role of cruelty in art (and, sometimes, in life).The catalogue of painters, sculptors, performance artists, filmmakers, philosophers, and writers is intimidating and impossible...

this was so difficult to read sometimes but really worth it

“While the two words often arrive sutured together, I think it worthwhile to breathe some space between them, so that one might see “brutal honesty” not as a more forceful version of honesty itself, but as one possible use of honesty. One that doesn’t necessarily lay truth barer by dint of force, but that actually overlays something on top of it—something that can get in its way. That something is cruelty.”Mind is in a tangle but this was brilliant. Review to come. Maybe.“So long as we exalt art...

I've become more and more caught by social cruelty in recent years - stopped short, eyes blinking, "You're kidding me, right?" caught by it - and I think this is because I'm growing older. I just have this tendency to imagine, in an incredibly solipsistic way, that everyone's maturing with me. That we're all in this together. That as the years pass we're all having (not the same but) similar experiences, learning similar lessons, absorbing similar outlooks on the realities of this life-thing, an...

Okay. So. I hated this. And not in a "It was infuriating" way, just in a "Wow! This sucks" way. And that's harsh, I know. Maybe it isn't even fair at all - after all, I know very little about art or its critics, and this book clearly belongs to a discourse I'm wildly unfamiliar with. But that means very little to me, especially because it literally just isn't my job to be totally familiar with the discourse. No doubt I will reconsider, and perhaps some of Nelson's critiques might become more rel...