So Maggie Nelson on a bad day is better than just about anyone on their best day. Am I disappointed that I was not as crazy about this essay collection as I was "Bluets" or "Argonauts?" A little bit. Her assertions are a bit more academic than I like (that's really only because I am not nearly as smart as Maggie Nelson) and the spoonful of Bluets and cupful of Argonauts that are about Maggie Nelson herself to me balance out the density of her citations, research and ideas. We don't get any of that here and I missed it.

Still, I would read Maggie Nelson write anything. I started with Bluets a year ago and have been screaming "more, more" since. I've only got one book of her essays left and then I'll start on the poetry. This one may not be my favorite but I maintain that every new Maggie Nelson book cannot arrive fast enough. ( )

2.9 A careful and studious Cultural Studies look at the way cruelty is contained in art. Nelson is articulate and interesting, but ultimately unsatisfyingly indecisive. The examples and semi-theses repeat a bit clumsily and the book comes across as serious-voiced overstatement. Some of the examples are unbearable, others fascinating. Mostly it seems as if Nelson began the book without a complete idea then realized it had been covered by Barthes'[b:The Neutral: Lecture Course At The College De France 1977-1978|112600|The Neutral Lecture Course At The College De France 1977-1978 (European Perspectives a Series in Social Thought and Cultural Ctiticism)|Roland Barthes|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1171660007s/112600.jpg|108414] ( )

I've never read any Maggie Nelson and I am glad I have. I disagree with some of her arguments, but most of it is extremely salient, and hard to stomach. It also gets points for shouting out ; Angela Carter (for the Sadeian Woman), Anais Nin (for the graphic description of the seduction of her father in Incest: A Diary of Love) and a bunch of other women I strongly admire for their own grotesque behaviors. Takes a minute and my audiobook version is read by someone I really don't like (the voice really makes the audiobook) but it's something I can ignore at this point. ( )

There is a lot to ponder here. I wish it had been more logically ordered. Nelson moves among genres--theater, art, performance art, found art, pornography, novel, poetry, photography, art criticism--in a nondiscriminatory way. I frequently had trouble seeing the synthesis she evidently saw in her wish to discuss together representations of documented, actual cruelty (Abu Ghraib) vs. staged artful cruelty (for example, Yoko Ono's performance art, "Cut Piece"). In this way Nelson's work differs markedly from Susan Sontag's remarkable [b:Regarding the Pain of Others|52373|Regarding the Pain of Others|Susan Sontag|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1355997884s/52373.jpg|430074], which laser-focused on the problem of our response to photography that depicts actual, terrible acts.

Also, I wish Nelson had spent more time discussing when the art of cruelty claims veracity and instruction as its reason to exist. Sometimes the examples of cruelty in the works I'm thinking of are so graphic and detailed and exhaustive that I wonder when they become exploitative rather than instructive. In spite of the existence of the dismissive label of "victim art" for these works, it also seems to be important to the audience that the artist has actually been a victim--otherwise the work might be deemed less authentic or genuinely exploitative. If you have been a victim of such acts then your work is absolved from being called exploitative and is called "true" and "brave" instead. I'm not sure if "I experienced it" works as an aesthetic or moral argument for judging art--it seems that the art object or novel or poem should stand on its own. Nelson does discuss works in this category of "cruel" but her argument is diluted by the scope of her examples. ( )