Shock and Controversy in Art

Banksy's Untitled (LA, 2011)


Goya's Saturn, 1820-23


Shock and controversy can be powerful tools in art, encouraging a more profound sense of audience engagement by challenging and pushing boundaries. The Aesthetic value of beauty and taste in art is part of the evolution of art history and the climate or culture they amplify.

Traditional notions of taste and beauty standards hold boundaries repeatedly broken under novelty. The shock and controversy factor should align with a larger aesthetic concept to reveal a cultural moment. Standards of taste and aesthetic value seem unnecessary, lose their value, or go astray when disconnected from a greater purpose or utilized simply for shock value.
Classical art movements, such as the 18th-century Reformation and its Romanticism style of painting, convey a more extreme range of emotions within the human experience.

Goya's Romanticism is similar to the Orientalism movement, which was used to fetishize other cultures and the imperialism it further validated. Impressionism broke away from classical realism and defied the current standards of high art with perspective and the definition of refined technique.

20th-century Pop art was a movement in response to the production of art and technology. It had its own shock value and provocative mission to make art more accessible and challenge the ad agencies' creativity status quo. Contemporary art has continued to incorporate the role of taste, controversy, and shock within its art movements. Banksy used street art to make a controversial statement with his medium and spontaneous process, his message, and the subject of his paintings. In Banksy's Untitled, LA (2011), he emphasizes the injustice and the consequences of the housing crisis. A little Black girl watches her child-like drawing of a home getting boarded up due to foreclosures happening primarily in underprivileged neighborhoods.

References:

Introduction and Chapter One, in Freeland, C. (2003). Art Theory: A Very ShortHughes, R. (2017, December 24). 


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