Disturbing art must also exploit the audience’s attraction to what disturbs

Evidence

Unlike violence in most popular postmodern movies, it is meant primarily to disturb, rather than to entertain, the audience: to insist on a profound critique of our culture and politics rather than to thrill us viscerally and momentarily, allowing us at once to experience and to displace violence with varyingly minimal critical or intellectual repercussions. Nonetheless, partly because Godard was interested in the meaninglessness, randomness, pervasiveness, and gratuitousness of contemporary violence, and partly because Godard understood that in order to disturb the audience the film must also appeal to the audience’s attraction to violence that is itself disturbing, Weekend also has the effect of uncritical, visceral, entertaining thrill, in a way that is recognizable as a precursor of the pervasive violence, often accompanied by various modes of selfconscious ambivalence, of popular movies in postmodernity. — Marianne DeKoven, Utopia Limited, 408

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: A genuinely sharp paradox about critical art: critique must first recruit the very appetite it condemns.
• XREF: connects to: Audiences expected transgressive art to be violent rather than pleasant — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now: The 1960s New York…, 604; Theater can physically coerce audiences into witnessing simulated atrocity — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now: The 1960s New York…, 1501

Broader Connections

• Theater can physically coerce audiences into witnessing simulated atrocity #exemplifies (0.80) — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 1501
• Audiences expected transgressive art to be violent rather than pleasant #qualifies (0.78) — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 604