I’m still not sure why failed or bad attempts at art are “immoral”. -Dad commenting on this.
This is a controversial point, but it wasn’t for Plato. The quality of art he despises in The Republic is that it misleads. It conditions us to expect and hope for what will not come, in his view; it is a saccharine lie or an ideological lie or an incompetent lie. One needs only to think of propaganda to know what he meant, but one can also imagine a middle-American mom disappointed that her camping trip doesn’t look like a Thomas Kincaide painting or shattered that her romance isn’t reminiscent of The Notebook.
Art’s mission has changed since Plato’s time; it now serves less often as a vehicle for explicit messages than as a vehicle for quasi-impartial exploration. That is hugely important, and why art as we understand it emerges from the Western tradition first: it is bound up with notions of liberty and the individual.
But bad art naturally remains. When Plato forbids poets and painters from his ideal city, he does so for the health of the populace: they must not be deceived about the world or their place in it. When I watch television or read pulp novels or see movies who serve mainly to reinforce body dysmorphia and status anxiety, his argument resonates.
That is: bad art obscures reality, lulls us into a stupor in which we are confused about who and what we are and how the world is, manipulates us cheaply and in a way that reinforces our worst habits of feeling, and drives us further from any sort of awareness.
When we read bad books or savor bad movies, we sometimes tell ourselves that they have no effect: they are just for fun. But not only is the human mind too porous for that to be true, even how we have fun is something learned; we condition ourselves through exposure such that choosing the worst over the best is a perverse way to deform ourselves.
When I play violent video games, my dreams get bloody; what will happen if I immerse myself in television, then? We think we are stronger than we are: too many fairy tales heard, too many bronzed and plastic bodies seen, and we cannot accept reality; we want its televisual simulation more. We will close our eyes when having sex to preserve the dream.
The radically inaccurate expectations we have of each other, of the world, of ourselves, the confused sense we grow up with that life is something happening tomorrow and that we will attain happiness if only we find someone attractive enough (or are attractive enough ourselves): these are easily identified as the wounds of bad art. But art that is marginally better is no less harmful; I remember thinking how American Beauty would further embed certain terribly shallow memes into our psyche and incline us to reduce our fellow humans to caricatures.
In sum: good art increases one’s understanding of the self and the world through exploration, simulation, provocation, and so on; bad art decreases it persistently and does so by its sentimentally exploitative nature as much as its incompetence. It violates the purpose of art and does damage to us all: hence its immorality.
