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  • Art's Cruel Practice

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    Art's Cruel Practice

    by George Bataille

    Unit 1: The Beautiful Corpse

    How to Die in the Cannon Without Really Trying

    Fall, 2025

    Read the Text

    Every semester, I ask my 101 students what they think art is. And every semester, I get the same answers:


    "It's how you express yourself."

    "It's how you engage with your community."


    These are fine....human, earnest, I've nodded along, out of laziness, out of respect for the effort. I don't want to discourage, because I don't even know how to answer that question myself.

    

    But in Art's Cruel Practice, Bataille comes not with expression or community, but with rupture. With sacrifice. With the terrifying possibility that real art doesn't soothe the soul. It wounds it.


    Bataille imagines the artist as someone who must journey to the very edge of death and come back changed. If you're lucky, you return with a glimpse of the "exploding city that constitutes the meaning of life." If you're unlucky, you don't come back at all.


    Sure, you could read that metaphorically. Where Plato's philosopher leaves in search of light and truth, Bataille's artist chases death and fleeting ravishment. But think of artists who actually destroyed themselves for the work: through drugs, alcohol, obsession, or the pressure of trying to represent the unrepresentable.


    Consider Pliny the Elder, who literally died trying to get a closer look at an exploding volcano. He sailed toward Vesuvius while everyone else fled, so he could observe it up close and take notes. That's Bataille's artist: obsessively curious, recklessly devoted, and probably doomed. He wanted a clearer view, and it killed him. According to Bataille, the artist must accept that risk.


    The viewer (you) gets to sit comfortably on the outside. You don't have to get close to the volcano. You don't have to go mad, or suffer, or almost die. The artist does that for you. They're the sacrificial victim. You're just the tourist taking pictures of the shrine.


    So why must it be that extreme? Can't art be meaningful without violence or death? Can't vulnerability be enough?


    Not really.


    According to Bataille, you can't fake transgression. There is no ethical consumption of revelation. Earning it means being willing to lose yourself in the process.

    

    Bataille draws a line between sacred violence and aesthetic form:

    • Religious art depicts martyrs torn apart for our sins.
    • Modern art rips objects apart to show us how they work.


    Cubists and Surrealists deconstruct everyday things (bottles, bodies, guitars) like ritual sacrifices. These aren't just abstract games. They're stand-ins for crucifixions. That's their appeal. The artist dismembers form so we don't have to.


    But even the grotesque must entice. Art must attract even when it disgusts. Art that repels fails. A crucifixion that makes you look away isn't doing its job. You must want to see. To get closer. To feel the heat of the thing that's killing the artist.


    Artists are cursed with an inability to forget the infantile, terrifying questions:

    • Why am I here?
    • What does it mean?
    • Why must I die?


    Most people learn to tune those out. They get jobs. They fold laundry. But artists? They keep turning over stones, looking for meaning. Eventually, they arrive at the inevitable suspicion: Maybe the only real answer is found in death, immediately followed by the realization that the answer is useless if you're actually dead. So they go right up to the edge to get the best view and bring it back (packaged) for us. That's the cruel practice. Batille's artist is a martyr, sacrificing safety and sanity to bring us a fleeting glimpse of truth.


    If you're an artist, Bataille wants you ruined. He wants you naked before the gods. He wants your ego stripped, your comfort obliterated. It's not about beauty. It's not about meaning. It's about getting close enough to the fire to singe your eyelashes and coming back with a sketch.


  • Vuillard

    I've owned exactly one book on Vuillard. Twice. I've bought it, lost it, bought it again, and lost it again. I hope it turns up. (edit: just found it)


    The facts I've retained are fragmentary and mostly beside the point: trained in the academy, his mother was a seamstress, was part of Les Nabis. These details don't amount to understanding.


    Truthfully, I don't know very much about any painter. Not in the way we usually mean. Biographies, timelines, movements, and theories of influence - none of this information stays with me for very long. I wish it did. Maybe it's from adhd, or drugs, or the internet. But perhaps those frames of reference are too linear for the kind of looking that painting demands.


    I do know Vuillard's paintings. I've been looking at them for as long as I've been painting. When I see dappled light breaking through trees, or the hush of a private room my day-to-day, these things appear to me as Vuillard might have painted them.


    Color against color. Pattern over pattern. Not harmony, but vibration. Satisfaction and cohesion without clarity, albeit with an underlying tension, just shy of coherence. The figure sinks into the armchair, which dissolves into the curtain, which drifts into the wall. Subject and background soften into each other, collapse gently, then reconstitute themselves as sticky, crusty, amorphous forms.


    These paintings resist analytical looking, but offer another way of seeing. A kind of leisurely drifting through the painting. There's formal rigor beneath the surface, but it doesn't announce itself. The pleasure is too immediate, too rich, and with it comes unease. Anything this gratifying must be suspect.


    Something starts to happen if you sit with a subject long enough and paint it with real attention. Not revelation, exactly. Not the 'a-ha' of academic problem-solving, but something slower. Like watching fog lift from a mirror. The image doesn't emerge all at once; it accumulates. The paint thickens. The surface records not what you saw, but how long you looked. Like the grooves on a record, the marks and the spaces between them hold finely tuned pockets of time.


  • When moral seriousness meets market logic

    The art world invites strange alliances. Painters achieve considerable success making indulgent, facile work. And yet, you find yourself rooting for them out of a stubborn allegiance to the discipline itself. Hey, at least they're painting. Sometimes, these alliances form not out of shared ideology but from a mutual recognition of what others are unwilling to acknowledge.


    In this contradictory spirit, I long to build a philosophical bond with Roger Kimball. His writing, particularly in Art's Prospect (2003), often takes the form of lonely lamentation, mourning the collapse of aesthetic standards. In the book's opening essay, The Museum as Funhouse, Kimball articulates an incisive critique of the loss of institutional rigor:

     

    "Art museums were democratic, but not necessarily demotic institutions. They were open, but not necessarily accessible, to all. The bounty they offered exacted the homage of informed interest as the price of participation. Accessibility was a privilege that anyone could earn, not a right that everyone enjoyed."


    He resists flattening aesthetic standards in the name of inclusivity and asserts the dignity of difficulty. Kimball's sentiments here don't endorse gatekeeping but insist that cultural literacy, like any meaningful form of literacy, is earned through labor and not bestowed by institutional fiat.


    I didn't grow up frequenting museums or libraries filled with monographs or with a family fluent in the codes of art history. Whatever understanding I have has been assembled haltingly, over time. And it has transformed me. Kimball's argument is not elitist. It is aspirational. Institutions that should embrace the slow cultivation of receptivity, take the much easier path of reducing accessibility to simplification. He's right to call this out, and he's one of the few who do so with such vigor.


    But two pages later, he characterizes MASS MoCA's use of the term "cultural production" as an expression of a "Marxist view of art." Here, his rhetorical precision gives way to reflexive ideology. To equate the language of cultural labor with Marxism, particularly in an institution underwritten (partly) by private capital, governed by a board of corporate executives, and driven by the logic of ticket sales, is disingenuous. The Whitney, The MoMA, The Guggenheim. These are not revolutionary cells. They are mechanisms of elite consensus.


    He diagnoses the commodification of museums and the infantilization of audiences, but fails to critique the economic structures that underwrite these shifts, misassigning blame to the point of caricature: "Marxism" becomes a stand-in for that which he finds culturally distasteful. And Kimball, a scholar of intellectual depth, does himself a disservice by making an argument that is beneath him.


    He rightly acknowledges that museums have adopted the logic of entertainment and corporate branding, and that their rhetoric of inclusivity can mask a more profound disengagement with rigor. However, Kimball's critique remains incomplete and reactive by misplacing the source of these developments in the cultural left.


    This tension extends beyond his art criticism. In the updated 2008 preface to Tenured Radicals, Kimball laments the fragmentation of the humanities into "studies" disciplines and the academically unserious proliferation of workshop-based curricula. Yet he remains conspicuously silent on the broader political and economic assault on the humanities. The defunding of departments, the adjunctification of faculty labor, and the cultural campaigns that have encouraged students to abandon liberal education in favor of vocational training. (Thus removing working-class voices from the cultural conversation completely).


    In Tenured Radicals, free speech is an excuse liberals use to justify inviting ex-members of the Weather Underground into the classroom. Today, Kimball sits on the board of Ralston College, a self-styled bulwark of free thought and academic virtue, whose chancellor is Jordan Peterson.


    Kimball cites the rise of Fox News and conservative talk radio as hopeful signs of resistance to a "leftist" cultural hegemony. One, he asserts, is dominated by aging ex-radicals obsessed with gender identity and hellbent on the destruction of Western civilization. But what does he make of the forces those media platforms have unleashed twenty years later? Does he still believe the solution to cultural incoherence lies in figures like Sean Hannity?


    And yet, I continue to find value in his provocations. He is one of the few living art critics willing to engage with aesthetic experience with even the slightest posturing of moral seriousness. In his best moments, Kimball reminds us that art is not merely a vehicle for messaging, but a demanding encounter with form, tradition, and the imagination.