Art, Ethics: A Journey is a collection of critical essays that investigates the history of artistic practice through the lens of ethics. Across 88 chapters, it brings together artists and artworks that openly brush against criminality, as well as those whose ethical problems remain subtle and largely unnoticed. It examines works that have cost audiences their lives, performances that deliberately placed viewers in danger, and artworks that profoundly unsettled their audiences. What was Marco Evaristti thinking when, in Helena (2000), he placed live goldfish inside working blenders and left visitors free to decide whether to switch them on? What should we make of Jens Haaning, who, after being commissioned by a museum and given 530,000 Danish kroner in cash to create a work involving the mounting of money on canvases, instead delivered two blank canvases and retitled the piece Take the Money and Run?
Rather than proposing a fixed moral framework, the book opens a space for negotiating some of the most enduring dilemmas of the art world, not only for artists and creators but also for audiences, or simply anyone who, from time to time, encounters films, music, comic books or literature.
Rather than proposing a fixed moral framework, the book opens a space for negotiating some of the most enduring dilemmas of the art world, not only for artists and creators but also for audiences, or simply anyone who, from time to time, encounters films, music, comic books or literature.