#1276 Daisy Dixon - Depraved: The Story of Dangerous Art

00:00 Ricardo Lopes: Hello everyone. Welcome to a new episode of The Dissenter. I'm your host, as always, Ricardo Lops, and today I'm joined by a return guest, Dr. Daisy Dixon. She's a lecturer in philosophy at Cardiff University, and today we're going to talk about her book Depraved The Story of Dangerous Art. So Dr. Dixon, welcome back to the show. It's always a pleasure to talk with you.

00:23 Daisy Dixon: Ah, thank you, it's great to be back. Thanks for having me.

00:26 Ricardo Lopes: No, I, I, I mean, it's awesome to have you back. I really loved the book, by the way, and so it's, I'm really excited to finally have you on the show again to talk about it. So, uh, but let me start with this question. I, I, I know that we could go down a big rabbit hole. Here because I know that people who work in aesthetics, there's a huge never ending discussion about what is art, what counts as art, and all of that, but I mean, in your book, do you use a specific definition of it? I mean, what do you mean by art

01:02 Daisy Dixon: exactly? Yeah, so I kind of take a sneaky approach in the book. I kind of avoid trying to define art. And in part that's because art itself is a tricky kind of concept to get clear on. And I think because the function of the book wasn't to necessarily get clear on a definition. I kind of play with a few sort of popular definitions that it's like a human made object, perhaps intended to communicate some kind of meaning. Or indeed to like have certain aesthetic properties. I also skirt around the institutional, uh, definition of art where it's just any object or any event or thing, um, that has been sort of granted the status of art by a certain authority like an art world or certain experts. Um, BUT in the book, I end up just sort of going for it I know it when I see it. Uh, APPROACH, which basically means that I kind of do it by extension instead. So I include things like traditional art objects like uh painting and sculpture, literature, like, you know, novels and film, video art, but I also go into like more contemporary pieces like installations, performance, uh, but I also include video games as well. Um. And that's in part that has had a little bit of um not pushback, but sort of surprise from some commentators in the general public at least. And obviously philosophers of art have been interested in video games for a long time. There's a huge area of like philosophy looking at video games now. And I think that's in part because of its fictional worlds, most of the time. Um, AND the fact the viewer can kind of co-create those fictional worlds is an important thing. So yeah, quite a wide. Conception

03:00 Ricardo Lopes: so you've been getting pushback from the general public when it comes to labeling video games as art, is that it?

03:11 Daisy Dixon: Yeah, I mean, not much pushback, just some surprise, I guess, and I think this has been an interesting thing, writing a book for the general public, um, taking kind of philosophical assumptions of what's done in academia. And philosophers of art have been looking at video games for a long time as a kind of art form. And I do see them as an art form, but I think there are still some people, uh, in the general public that would that would kind of put our video games into a different kind of category. Um, BUT I think they are an art form, even if they're particularly. Peculiar, especially in the fact that the viewer, the player is co-creating that fictional world at the same time.

03:52 Ricardo Lopes: Well, I mean, I guess that it could be argued that whenever people are interpreting a work of art, in at least to some extent they are sort of co-creating.

04:06 Daisy Dixon: Yeah, yeah. And that is a balance I play with, uh, in the book, the trying to marry that tension between the artists kind of act. I see I see artworks is kind of peculiar forms of art and communication, uh, often using, um, Aesthetics or a material in a way to communicate something sometimes across, um, dimensions, sometimes depending on what your religious beliefs are, also across, um, societies and across time as well. Um, SO even if we don't see them as like ordinary language, I see them as acts of communication. And so in that you Encounter similar issues with communication as to who is creating the meaning, and I try and go for a kind of, the artist is really important and their social identity, their placement in history is really important to, Getting out what an artwork means, but the viewer absolutely has agency. In reaching that meaning and as I go on later in the book to look at actually destroying that meaning as well.

05:21 Ricardo Lopes: Mhm, YEAH, we will certainly get back into that topic later in our conversation. I mean, because you're talking about ethics in your book, the ethics surrounding art, do you approach it through any specific ethical theory, ethical system, or not?

05:42 Daisy Dixon: Yeah, so kind of like the art definition question, I don't settle on a particular moral theory. So I do glance at um a few normative. MORAL theories like consequentialism, like the ontological theories. I also dance over kind of meta ethical questions of is there such a thing as a moral fact? And if so, is it determined by, um, something natural that could be determined by sort of scientific investigation, empirical investigation, or is it a non-natural thing like, um, Exists in some kind of abstract realm that we detect via intuition, um, and reason. So, What I do do though is adopt a kind of objectivism. So I I kind of reject moral relativism. I also reject a nihilistic approach. I do think there is such a thing as right and wrong, good and bad. Um, I As I say, I don't settle on exactly what makes something good and bad. It could, for instance, be. You know, bad consequences that result in just pain, um, or it could be a violation of a moral law that we've reached either from some divine being or just via reason, um. But I do go for an objectivism, so I kind of say that. There are objective things that are wrong, because the book is looking at immorality in particular. There are certain things that are wrong and bad, and I say these aren't going to be up for discussion. So I give examples of that, um, like, Um, sexual violence, um, enslavement of people, and then kind of more abstract, uh, not abstract, but more structural systems, um, like racism, sexism, transphobia, ableism, ageism. And general social inequalities like the unfair distribution of wealth and things. I think these things are objectively bad, and they are bad, this is the other thing that's been slightly controversial for the public is, you know, Someone judging artworks based on a seeming moral system of today. But that's I've always found that very problematic, kind of relativistic position. Like I'm sure the millions of people who've been slaved in, you know, for instance, in the transatlantic slave trade, the millions of black women, men and children, I'm sure. They wouldn't have judged that that at the time that that was OK. So we need to be careful who the kind of moral judges are when we talk about moral relativism.

08:41 Ricardo Lopes: Mhm. Talking about that actually, when it comes to how we should be careful about who the moral judges are when it comes to moral relativism, or different kinds of moral perspectives that people might hold, uh, I wanted to ask you about the term you use in your, in your book, depravity, because I, I mean, at least in Portuguese culture where I live, but that with Imagine that also in the UK and other places we tend to hear terms like depraved or degenerate more from people who are on the right wing of the political spectrum, conservative people, religious people. Do you think that using such a term, with using such a term, there could be a risk that we would be serving? The interests of those kinds of people and for example, I'm just going to use an example. People could use the term depraved to refer to creations by gay artists, for example, someone might use that term to condemn the works of Freddie Mercury, let's say. So what, what do you think about that?

10:00 Daisy Dixon: I think that's a great point. And I think that is something that came out when I was writing the book, um, but also, um, beginning to, uh, learn. And so one author said to me that when you start touring a book, you actually learn what it's about, um, after you've written it. I do think that's kind of true. So I think that's a really good point about the connotations of the word depravity absolutely seem to be. And I think that is also sort of the case in the UK. It's a word often reached by and used by kind of right wing commentators, often in tandem with obscene, as you say, degenerate, smutty, um, and it's often used to, uh, denounce. Art by marginalized artists or indeed art that presents sex in a way that doesn't fit with kind of dominant whatever the particular religion, let's just say Christian, a kind of dominant Christian doctrine of what sex should or can look like. Um, SO I do, so I think when I was using the word depravity and in the book I say that I'm thinking about it in terms of something that's extremely immoral. Um, SO, you know, a white lie, telling you a white lie to make you feel good might be technically wrong, but we wouldn't really say it's depraved or like extremely immoral. Or maybe Emmanuel Kant would, but, you know, it's bad, it's bad insofar as it's a lie. It's it's not like the worst thing we could do. And then of course there's a spectrum and then we go all the way from. Um, ABUSE of another human being to genocide, right? And so when I use it, I mean extremely immoral. But what was interesting in writing the book is that I did notice that it was being used, um, by some right wing commentators to describe art that is conventionally, uh, deviant or deviates from kind of what we deem to be conventionally acceptable, depending on what society we live in. Um. And so in a way, the book has become a kind of attempt to reclaim that word, um, whilst there's this kind of philosophical, like this is what I mean when I use the word, it's also kind of become this thing of, Like one newspaper reported, did an interview with me and it said, Daisy Dixon's standing up for depravity. And I was like, OK, but in a way that's true. Because if, if when if what they, if what some people think is depraved, and it's just like queer art. Then yeah, like, so maybe it's an attempt to reclaim what that what depravity actually means as well.

12:50 Ricardo Lopes: Yeah, yeah, that's a very interesting approach. I've had conversations with feminist scholars on the show where they told me that, I mean, it's been something that feminists have also done in recent decades is to reclaim the B word, for example, right? I mean, I mean turning it into something that is not really. Uh, PEJORATIVE, but something that feminists themselves and women more generally can use, so I mean there's that kind of approach as well.

13:27 Daisy Dixon: Yeah, definitely. And I think, um, obviously the reclamation of slurs is a tricky thing because, um, different groups who are the target of that slur, different people in that group are going to disagree that for instance, uh, many black people do not want to reclaim the N word, even though some do. Um. You know, some specifically sexist slurs. I don't like any of them. So I don't like want to reclaim any of them. Um, BUT I think with depraved, there is something potentially quite powerful that we can do with that. So if you put an asterisk against it, maybe, like, yes, we should all be depraved and that, you know, this is an important thing to be to be transgressive is important. But doing that with an objective moral system in place, like to call queer art depraved. Is wrong insofar as you're saying it's extremely immoral, it's not, but if we want to use depraved with like an asterisk or something, then, yeah, let's all be depraved in that way. Yeah.

14:36 Ricardo Lopes: So we're going to go through the several different ways you explore in the book as to how works of art can be moral, but do you think that artworks themselves can be depraved, to use your terminology, independently of whether the artist, him or herself, is depraved or independently of their intentions?

15:03 Daisy Dixon: Yeah, so Whether or not an artwork itself is depraved is a tricky question because it can relate to immorality in ways that might not necessarily mean that it itself is depraved. So for instance, an artwork might cause or inspire someone to do something terrible, but it not necessarily be immoral in itself. It doesn't have those like moral properties as part of the actual work of art. Um, BUT there are cases when, An artwork itself is depraved insofar as um its relation to morality pertains to its actual properties as in regards to its meaning and what it's about and what it's doing. Um, SO that's in terms of its moral perspective. So it's not simply that it's depicting something immoral, um, it's when the artwork is inviting the viewer to adopt a problematic attitude, or we might say immoral attitude to what's being depicted. So, you know, for instance, an artwork that glamorizes sexual violence or champions, um, you know, enslavement. Um, Or celebrates a totalitarian regime, like a lot of Nazi propaganda, for instance, would do. Um, SO in that sense it's moral perspective is is part of its very identity as an artwork. So in that sense it can be depraved. However, As you rightly say, how that relates to the artist's intention is a tricky one. Most of the time. Or a lot of the time I'd say that the the reason the artwork has that perspective is in part because of the artist's intention. Um, Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will, which philosophers of art always use as an example, um, Thematically when just watching it without any kind of not like background knowledge, you can kind of see that it's it's a celebration or very positive looking film, um, about the Nazi regime and it's celebrating that. The fact that Leni Riefenstahl actually, um, believed in that is a way to kind of confirm it's immoral perspective because it's inviting us to do as viewers to do something wrong, um. But it's very, sometimes it can be the case that. An artist has a good intention. But the artwork's perspective kind of runs away from them. So this again, this is the problem of, yes, the artist is important, but they don't have complete authority over what their work not only can can do, but like indeed what it means as well, so. There are a few examples of this, um. One example would be Brett Bailey's exhibit B piece, um, from I think 2013. Um, Brett Bailey is a white South African man and in these, um, performances they were kind of like, uh, installations with performing actors, like living, um, kind of tableaus and. He was trying to expose the history of the human zoo and of um. The exploitative relations between Europe and Africa, particularly in the 19th century with the human zoos that were particularly prevalent in France and the UK. Um, AND he, he had good intention for it. Like that that's a morally laudable like thing to do. But because of the content of the work, because it involved actual black people, actors who had consented. But it involved them being chained up and put on display in this sort of recreation of the human zoo, and many people, not all, but many people said that the show was racist as a result, even though the art, you know, Brett Bailey intended the complete opposite, and there are other examples of this happening, so. Sometimes, uh, an art artworks more perspective might be distorted or indeed it it fails. Perhaps because of the way it's been curated. Maybe Brett Bailey's piece was wasn't adequately curated because people said it was re-performing the very power relations it was meant to critique. And that in part is because maybe Brett Bailey's identity is a white South African man. Mhm. Kind of put him in an impossible relation with his own work where um that power asymmetry that is historically significant. Was kind of unavoidable. So yeah, sometimes an artwork can have a more perspective that. Moves away from what the artist intended, which is unfortunate when that happens, because the show was closed down, it was canceled.

20:13 Ricardo Lopes: Yeah, I mean, you know, probably we're going to talk more about this later, but nowadays I'm very, I mean, I'm much more suspicious about more artists because of unfortunately over the years people uncovering the bad deeds of men, more and more artists out there. So for example, I used to be a very big fan of Neil Gaiman and Now I completely despise the man, and for example, now I know that in The Sandman, in one of the chapters, it depicts an episode where there's a man who basically is holding a woman hostage in in his apartment and he's exploiting her sexually to, I mean, get inspiration for his art and then Morpheus, I mean, basically. The Sandman saves the woman, and I mean now we know that Neil Gaiman was doing more or less the same with with a woman actually. So I mean sometimes I get more and more suspicious about if a particular author, particularly if he or she is very fixed on a particular depiction of a particular act. I mean nowadays I'm like, I mean, is it really just Art or is it that the person herself has those kinds of depraved thoughts and depraved desires, you know. Yeah,

21:50 Daisy Dixon: exactly, and I think a lot of people are really struggling with everything that it seems continues to come out about Neil Gaiman and how that's affecting their engagement with his work, with his art, and I think in that case, the, It's almost as if depending on what the artist's intention was, er and what their motivation was in making that work, that can affect the very properties of that artwork, which would mean that even people who aren't aware, cos often these things as you say, come out over time. I think it's not the case sometimes that the artwork changes in meaning. Unfortunately, sometimes, again, if that intention and motivation is there, if Gaiman was deliberately sort of imagining that scene and giving it to the reader in a way that he was getting some kind of gratification from it or arousal from it, that unfortunately is part of the artwork's meaning and identity, even if the reader didn't know about it. So I think there's this interesting case of when artworks are these. Incredibly rich objects that we can continue to discover their properties, their meanings, their aesthetic properties. Perhaps those works are now ugly, as a result. Perhaps, you know, they, their artistic value has gone down. If you think the artistic and the moral realms interact in that way, if an artwork is immoral, it might make it worse as an artwork if you're a particular moralist in the debate, um. But it's almost as if I'd say those properties were always there, even if we couldn't detect them. But I do think as well with the moral artist problem. There are different ways that that moral character can come out, but it seems like in Neil Gaiman's case, I mean, I've only read one of his books, and I can't recall that it, you know, that it had anything egregiously, you know, relevant to his own crimes and his misdeeds. But your example is fantastic, er, is a great example of how an artist's immorality is kind of evidenced by the, Uh, artwork, and in that case it is obviously a problematic connection that would indeed affect how you interpret the, the story, whatever it is.

24:15 Ricardo Lopes: Uh, uh, WHAT do you think, I, I mean, and, and also, uh, along the same line of thought of us over time uncovering depraved acts by artists. I mean, sometimes I, I find myself thinking about this. Do you think that we as consumers of art should be held responsible for, I don't know, of course, some of these. Acts we can't just find them out for ourselves. I mean, it has to be the proper authorities doing that and then it coming out to the public. But do you think that we should perhaps be a little bit more responsible with searching as best we can, the life of the particular artists, the particular creators?

25:03 Daisy Dixon: Yeah, that's a really good question. I think we need to be careful about being placing sort of those level of demands on consumers of our, especially in our society at the moment where we're all sleep deprived in in different ways depending on gender and race, things like that. There's like a sleep gap, there's a gender pay gap, there's like. And I feel like to to consume art in this day and age is already quite a privileged thing to do. And we all have so little time. So I'd be wary of kind of saying, yeah, that it was the responsibility would fall on on the viewer to like really detect the true or the kind of core properties that are in that work that they might not know if they just consumed it. And that's why I think. I wouldn't necessarily blame someone for just escaping in Neil's, for instance, Neil Gaiman's um stories. I wouldn't blame someone necessarily for doing that, but I do think what we do have a responsibility to to do is when we are told, or when we do others, as you say, of some other way find out, we do have a responsibility to. Think critically about our relationship. With that artwork, like for instance. When I was growing up, I didn't like go again, but that's just because he upset Van Gogh, who's like my all time favorite artist, um. That's like, OK, like that, you know, that's, whatever reason I, and I actually never really liked his paintings anyway, and it might be because I as a young girl, I was looking at them, I was like well, I'm looking at a young girl sort of naked on the bed and as a kid I didn't have the vocabulary to really articulate why that was a bit gross. Um, BUT maybe there was something in me that was a reason I didn't like them. And I think I have a responsibility as a blossom of art. To honor things about Gauguin's life and to work out philosophically how that determines the properties of his artwork, um. I wouldn't blame someone else like I, one of my friends actually, she didn't know, even up until recently, she didn't know of the about Gauguin's paintings of his that they were of his child brides, and that this knowledge massively affected her. Experience, and appreciation, perception even of those paintings, but I wouldn't, I was, I didn't blame her for not knowing that before, um, but she has a responsibility now to look at them differently.

27:46 Ricardo Lopes: Yeah, in the case of Goge, I mean, I guess it was not just the sexism and the racism, but also the colonial mentality that is promoted through his paintings, correct?

28:00 Daisy Dixon: Yeah, and Gin is a tricky case because there are some uh scholars who have argued that he actually, his relationship with um, The locals in French Polynesia, in particular Tahiti and er Hivaa, er, a few of the places he lived, um, he had apparently a kind of knowledge about the local customs and particularly local names for people and deities, more he knew more about those groups than anthropologists did. So whilst we need to acknowledge that, that like his, his gaze wasn't entirely like. Um, DISMISSIVE of this group. I think he genuinely had a fascination, and, er, with, with these, um, with, with French Polynesian people. However, Despite that, we also need to, um, acknowledge the fact that when he went over there in his 40s, when he abandoned his wife and children, he was escaping France and what he saw is actually relevant to what you're saying before about depraved. He saw European culture is degenerate, and he saw French Polynesia as Eden, untouched by kind of toxic, uh, European civilization. But he also saw the people there as so-called savages. In his own diaries, he wrote of, um, Polynesian girls in particular as animal-like. Um, HE described them as snake-like and er deep down desiring rape as well. So, absolutely, he went over there, he took advantage of local, um, Customs to do with child marriage, which is peculiar because yes, it was kind of normal in the 19th century in French French Polynesia to sell girls into into marriage. And people like, well, it was OK. It's like, well, no, just because that particular civilization or or society thinks that that's OK, doesn't mean it is. The fact that he took advantage of that. And yet, the fact that that was still permitted, but other parts of their culture had been banned because French colonial rule by this point had overtaken Polynesia, uh, their customs and own kind of, uh, culture had been suppressed by that point. So when he actually got there, he was just Gauguin was disappointed because he wasn't that far away from, you know, Christian France at this point. So, he definitely took advantage of his, you know, colonial power as he had there. Yeah.

30:59 Ricardo Lopes: So let's talk a little bit about depictions of sex and nudity, because I mean again for conservative people it's very common that they would label any depictions or almost any depictions of sex and. That has obscene. They use this word very often. So is it, do you think that it is right to judge artworks for the simple fact that they depict such scenes as obscene?

31:30 Daisy Dixon: No, absolutely not. And I think when we judge an artwork to be obscene, in part because of its sexual content, what we're at what's actually happening is that judgment derives normally from deep set prejudices or indeed, um, uh, an unfamiliarity with the artwork because it's showing sex in an unacceptable way. So if you compare, for instance, um. A lot of the sex or, um, erotic paintings of the Italian Renaissance, these paintings are glamorizing and eroticizing and in some cases sanitizing sexual violence. But because they were seen as like as part of the aristocratic or royal, um, they were often commissioned by royals. Um, FOR instance, you know, in Spain by King Philip the 2nd, um, They were treated as what the philosopher Anne Eaton notes in her paper on kind of the porn art divide as, um, honesto, like virtuous. So their sex is OK because it was for the upper classes, and that's OK. But if you, you know, once the invention of the printing press, particularly the German, not just the Chinese one, but the German one in particular, meant that a lot of kind of, um, saucy. Literature and prints as well, engravings started to reach the kind of lower rungs of society. That was seen as dishones though. So like, full of vice and problematic. So I think it's not, it's not just sex being depicted, it's who has ownership over it and who is being permitted to enjoy that. And this is also the case, um. When we have a clash of, uh, visions, in particular religious visions saturated with colonial mentality. So there's some amazing testimonies from medieval and early modern, uh, merchants who would, um, from Europe who would go to India and see some of the, um, Hindu and Jain, uh, temples that would, you know, show medieval, uh, Indian life, um, dancing, farming, um, food, things like that. But they're like few kind of sexually explicit carvings, for instance, the so-called Kama Sutra temples, which are actually called the Um, Kajuraho monuments, um, which are about 1000 years old. Only about 10% of those carvings show erotic sculpture. But because they were like very um explicit, but but really it wasn't the explicitness. I think that was the problem. It was the fact that it was this, um, non-Christian religion who saw sex differently to the kind of Christian mindset, um, of some of these travelers because sex, uh, and, you know, for instance, Hindu and Buddhist religion is not seen as a kind of um sinful thing to do. And it's not just it's to do with love and spirituality, it's not just to do with, um, procreation. So, And again it's about who has ownership over that sex as well, and this this this sort of um. Prejudice and double standards reaches all the way to like the 2020, um. Controversy around Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion's rap song, um, which I'll let your viewers look at what, what that stands for, but, um, you know, it's a bombastic ode to female pleasure, um, but there was huge outcry against it because it, uh, it was women of color, expressing their sexual agency. And the fact that it's women of color in particular doing this, who have for centuries been hypersexualized, um, and dehumanized via a sexual lens, um, to see women of color taking back their sexual agency, that's what's problematic. Um. And a lot of the right wing commentators that denounced it, um, as pure depravity. One person said a woman, a woman, I think said that as well. Um, OTHER commentators said it was just extremely vulgar step back in feminist progress. But at the time, the, uh, President Donald Trump was normalizing sexual assault. So sex is OK. And if it's in the locker room, discussed in the men's locker room, but it's not OK if a woman of color celebrates sex. So it's not about sex per se, it's about who has power over it.

36:21 Ricardo Lopes: Yeah, there, there's definitely lots of hypocrisy going around, and I mean, since we're talking about sex and nudity, I guess that, that makes a great segue into the, the topic of pornography because I've been having these conversations on the show about that in the sense that, OK, so sometimes people Uh, condemn, there are even feminists who condemn pornography, but something that they might not even realize, or, I mean, some of them perhaps don't even care about it, but they might not even realize the fact that by condemning just Pornography in general, I mean, at the same time they might be condemning queer art, LGBTQ plus art, and artistic expressions, and even when it comes to the, for example, the sex workers themselves, if we're talking about porn actresses because they at least, I mean we could argue they also produce. Artworks, I mean, they might be condemning them to poorer working conditions and also for women more generally, women in general, they might be even, even if unintentionally aligning themselves with a patriarchal stance in the sense that they are more broadly condemning female sexuality and female. Sexual pleasure. I mean, there there are, there are several layers to this. I mean, I would like to hear your thoughts about that.

38:11 Daisy Dixon: Yeah, absolutely, you capture the kind of complexities really well and I think I, I'm definitely sympathetic to, uh, the concern around some genres of pornography, which we've got to think about a lot of the time when the so-called porn wars erupted in the. 70s and 80s. This sort of came out of, um, particularly in the West, a general concern about what Mary Whitehouse, the campaigner called the overly like permissive society. And Mary Whitehouse in the 60s was concerned that obscene, what she would call kind of obscene videos, but she was mainly railing against pornography, was corrupting minds and in particular young minds. Now she, Herself was homophobic, and she should be denounced for that, but some of her lobbying did result in something good like she criminalized, um, she, her lobbying resulted in legislation that criminalized child pornography. And that's a good thing, and I think what she was correct about, and this is sort of the side of the porn wars that I am on, people like Andrea Da Walkin, Catherine McKinnon writing that pornography causes, or as my, um, mentor Ray Langton has sort of popularized the view that it constitutes as well as causes harm towards women. And I think when said about particular genres of pornography, um, those that eroticize, so in in egalitarian pornography, so those those pornographic works that eroticize, um, patriarchal kind of conditioning of what sex should look like. That eroticizes non-consent, that expresses and peddles rape myths, that um sort of creates certain scripts of what particularly girls and women should look like. So the kind of body types and the norms and what good sex looks like. This is all bad. Um, AND this is mainly because these were the dominant genres of porn at the time in the 70s and 80s. A lot of porn that was kind of mainstream was doing this, and I think that's, we got to be conscious that that's I think what the porn wars were. And Railing against and loads of studies show that, That that type of pornography and the extreme types of it as well, including snuff films, um, do unfortunately, er distort and perhaps deform boys and girls' expectations of what good sex is, what the, you know, dismissing consent, um, what what a sexually attractive body should look like. And the studies are there and the and the philosophers you write about this, like for instance again Anne Eaton, when someone says this porn causes harm towards women, it's not like a simple sort of billiard ball, like one, like simple picture of causation, like one ball hits the other. It's not that a boy or a man watching porn is just gonna go out and do something terrible to a woman. Anne Eaton compares it to smoking, which I think is a really powerful model, so smoking just one cigarette is not going to give you cancer, but smoking cigarettes habitually over a long period of time will at least increase your risk of cancer. And so a similar kind of disease based. Uh, MODEL can be used for consuming this particular genre of pornography, and that is what the studies are showing, sadly. Um, BUT we also need to bear in mind, There's a lot of transgressive and progressive, er, genres of pornography. Pornography today is so wide and varied, and there's a whole genre that you could call, I guess, like feminist pornography. Um, IT doesn't include like queer pornography, which will also have its own problems, but I think with the proliferation of, Pornographic material on the internet, especially now, we're we're we're we're beyond the magazines hiding under people's beds, right? Like it's got to such a point where there's conceivably any genre of porn you can think of, you can conceive it probably exists. So I do think we need to be worried about a lot of the mainstream porn that is still being consumed today.

42:50 Ricardo Lopes: Mhm. Yeah, uh, I mean, there are, I guess, uh, several layers to this question because, uh, I think, and I, and I think that you agree with me on that point that just condemning all pornography as those sorts of problems that I mentioned before and it condemns also queer artworks, LGBTQ artworks. It condemns sex, sex workers in different ways and Uh, female sexuality more broadly, but, uh, I mean, at the same time, uh, it seems to me that, that, uh many of the things that you said there, I mean, I agree with them, and also, for example, I've read on the show. Nina Hartley twice. She's basically a feminist sex icon, and she told me that for example, another issue that she's, she's found within the porn industry is that Uh, there are certain, uh, characteristics that people might have, like, for example, uh, race or ethnicity that might also work as a sort of, or, or might be fetishized in pornography, and that's also, that can also. Be problematic, but I mean, on the other hand, there's also the aspect, like for example, people like Meredith Ralston who talks about in her book slut shaming, war phobia and unfinished sexual revolution where basically she argues that by condemning just Pornography in general and sex work in general that uh as I said before, we are in a sense holding a patriarchal stance because we think that uh women, because I mean sex workers, the vast majority of them are women, shouldn't be allowed to express themselves sexually freely, you know.

44:56 Daisy Dixon: Yeah, and I think this idea about sexual agency, it's a tricky one because it's difficult to know and think about what sexual agency would look like, that is untouched or pure and not embedded in existing patriarchal culture. Um, AND indeed, you know, A lot of for some people sex isn't part of their identity, it's not important to their lives and we need to kind of bear in mind, those kinds of experiences as well, um I think the problem again as you say is, About the conditioning, the conditions under which people's sexual agency is expressed, and what we mustn't do is like, And I do, I do think that's what some of the dissenters to, um, I think I get the name of the show in there, the dissenters, um, of the sort of anti, uh, porn feminists saying like, oh, you know, you're anti-sex and things like that, and I, I sometimes they might have been, but I think that we have to be careful about. Um, PRESENTING that debate in a very kind of black and white way, um, it's about sexual violence, it's not about sexual pleasure that that is the problem, but I think you're right that we also need to leave room for, Talking about pornography in a way that doesn't, um, further marginalize and and problems and, you know, damage the people that are involved in making it and indeed the people who wish to consume it. Um, BUT we also need to do that whilst acknowledging the very real harms that do derive from some porn.

46:38 Ricardo Lopes: Mhm. Uh, DO you think that art can cause a crime, or is that for the most part a scapegoat or an excuse?

46:50 Daisy Dixon: Yeah, and this, this is, it's a nice sort of link to the porn debate as well, because the question of whether art can cause people to do bad things, um, I kind of run that in parallel with pornography insofar as, um. Again, we can rely on philosophical and psychological evidence and concepts to make sense of that causation claim, because on the one hand, we have, um, kind of ancient views, particularly from. Ancient Greece, like Plato's worry that particularly music could induce a kind of, it could disrupt the various parts of our soul, reason, er, spirit and desire, and most music really for Plato would stir up our emotions, our desires, um, and it kind of impacts and impede our rational faculties. So he was really worried about music in particular. And indeed poetry and theater that would present because of their realism, they would present kind of characters indulging in their emotions, which Plato thought was a bad thing. But Aristotle on the other hand, thought, no, like this is a good use for viewers to kind of. Experience their emotions via this character and as a healthy way to channel, what he called a kind of catharsis, a kind of release, so that they could then behave well, er, away from the art sphere. Um, AND we also have, this is part of the reason some of these thinkers were worried about art, causing us to do bad things is because particular view in antiquity was that art had kind of magical qualities that it could, um, It was called a, some classicists call it a mimetic contagion. So because of the kind of increasing realism of sculpture, theater, um. That people would, upon seeing these works frequently. That would actually cause them or induce them. It's almost like the artwork was sort of, uh, moving out of its frame and kind of like causing the person to imitate it or or do something really bad. And there are some amazing myths about, for instance, the ancient Greek sculpture of Aphrodite, the Aphrodite of Nidos from the 4th century BC, um, There was a Roman myth, uh, in this from the 2nd century BC that a man saw this sculpture and thought it was so lifelike and beautiful that he had sex with it, um, left a stain on it, let's just say. And when he was discovered over what he'd done, he was so full of shame that he threw himself off a cliff. And whether or not that story's true, it shows that these sculptures. With their lifelikeness and indeed their um they were often shown in public. Um, SENSE what the art historian Kenneth Clarke called a sensuous tremor across the Mediterranean. And now what we're seeing, this isn't just sort of left to the distance distant lands of antiquity. Now we have this problem, but particularly with video games, and similar kinds of studies are showing similar results to the pornography studies that playing video games habitually. And in particular violent video games, studies are showing that that actually. Even if not leads to criminal behavior, it, er changes people, it molds people's minds in a bad way. So some one study showed that playing violent video games on a regular basis actually, er meant that players had more ready access to aggressive thoughts than those that didn't, um. And again, I think philosophically what's happening here is the fiction reality boundary. Is particularly in video games is becoming increasingly porous because of their heightened realism. The graphics now, I've just seen some of like the Grand Theft Auto video game that's coming out I think in September, has been like highly anticipated for ages. It's the graphics just get more and more and more insanely real. You've got haptic feedback where you can feel the wet like the impact of weaponry or even rain, um in the tools you used to play with it. And this is only gonna get more and more. Extreme, um, and these, these, the, there is proof, seemingly proof that this is at least molding our minds in a bad way.

51:41 Ricardo Lopes: Yeah, but there are specific cases where the accusations lever that artists are ridiculous, right, because, for example, and of course I'm not defending the man completely because he also has some bad traits, but back in when the Columbine massacre. Occurred in the US there were people who were accusing Marilyn Manson because of his music of inciting or riling up young people to commit those kinds of acts of violence, but I mean in that particular case, I don't think that there's any link at all. I mean, not that Marilyn. Not that Marilyn Manson himself has not done any bad things. I mean, he has for sure, but I don't think that he ever incited people to do school shootings.

52:40 Daisy Dixon: Yeah, exactly, and I think in the book I'm careful to draw that distinction between there's lots of different models of causation that will be relevant to this question. But at least two I look at are the differences between arousal and incitement. So, in the case of the Columbine shooting massacre. The two shooters reportedly actually, not only were they not inspired by Marilyn Manson, apparently they also hated his music. So they were like, particularly away from, you know, Marilyn Manson, but Marilyn Manson by this point was already such a controversial figure, this kind of shock, horror rock, um, and particularly transgressive imagery that he would use in his videos. Um, WAS already of a huge concern, particularly amongst, um, some parents, and people would often picket outside of his concerts saying that his music was inciting, um, rape and violence and things like that. But Marilyn Manson, whilst acknowledging that he himself is no moral saint, he said that, This tragedy was a result of access to guns and kind of more general societal problems, probably with things like an early form of maybe the manosphere or something like that. It had nothing to do with his music, which he said simply encouraged, um, like teenagers basically to embrace difference. And, um, as a kind of healthy channel for their emotions. And he didn't think Goth subculture could should be to be, er, blamed for that tragedy. Um, BUT there are whilst there are cases when we have artworks like that, and in particular certain genres of music, so drill music, for instance, has been swept up in a recent moral panic, um, where drill artists are now being accused of inciting, um, Violence, particularly among black youths. And this has gone to like another extreme now because some of the lyrics in this music are being used as evidence. Um, DRILLERS are being kind of, um, censored and and treated almost similar to, um, uh, how terrorists should be, uh, investigated. Um, AND that people who have done committed a crime. The fact that they listen to drill is being taken as evidence of their kind of wayward character. The problem though is that the evidence just isn't there for this particular music for it's it's especially not inciting in this like straightforward way. So incitement is where a person explicitly urges another person to do something bad, and that intention has to be proven. And yes, in the past, artworks certainly can be forms of incitement. Nazi propaganda was very clearly incitement to genocide. No doubt. That's why Julius Stryker of the Sturmer Publishing House, who published all the anti-Semitic children's books, was hanged at the Nuremberg trials. So yes, art can incite violence. But we have to be careful which artworks we um sort of tar with that incitement brush, because in the case of drill, philosophers like Terry Jallow have argued that there's a kind of epistemic injustice happening here, where the drillers say. This is like a sort of complex, um, hybrid of fiction and bravado. ER, it's we're not confessing to having done these violent things, um, and yet people don't believe them, and that's in part because of their anti-black prejudices, particularly against black men for just being criminals. Um, AND that's distorting their, um. Judgment about that particular genre of music, so I think art can be connected to criminality in a direct way through incitement, but we have to be careful which artists we target with that and why.

57:02 Ricardo Lopes: Yeah, I mean, it's interesting. I, I'm just going to add, and you can also comment on it, that when it comes to the arousal bit specifically, of course, I'm not trying to establish a direct link here between, for example, metal music and violence, but there's also been research done on the fact that uh metal music also makes people angrier. So I mean, by listening to metal music, people. TEND to become angrier and of course I'm not sure if it depends on the particular style of metal because there are many different kinds of metal out there. There's industrial metal, black metal, death metal, power metal. So I mean it could depend a little bit on the particular style, but there's definitely been research done where people have established a link between listening to metal music and feeling angry.

58:02 Daisy Dixon: Yeah, and I, and I think as well there might be some similarity there with the video games. So consuming a certain type of music, um, that is, for instance, particularly violent, um, depicts or glamorizes violence, and some metal genres do do this, um. I wouldn't be surprised that there's a similar kind of result there, that it can mold people's emotions, it can kind of make them feel more negative emotions. But I am aware of another study, um, that I briefly mentioned in the book that shows the opposite. Well, not quite the opposite, but actually the idea that people listen to metal music because they're already angry. And I think this is why we need to be careful with, um, I don't, from what I might be wrong about this, I think a lot more research has been done on video games, as opposed to metal music. So it might be that the the data just isn't there yet. But the data at the moment seems uh A bit tricky because there's other studies showed that people approach metal music because they're already feeling angry and actually the music can be a safe and useful channel for that negative emotion. And often people from various different subcultures, alternative subcultures say, The particular kinds of music, for instance, metal, um, goth and rock and things like that. It actually makes them happier because there's the community aspect. There's the music, allowing them to find who they are, learn more about themselves. Uh, IN my case, at least, like embrace different beauty standards. Um, IT was a goth subculture that was the first to tell me that having red hair was a pretty thing. At that point, I've been bullied for it for years. So, yeah, I think, I think at the moment, the data's not quite there to show. Um, BUT then we do have famous cases of like Woodstock '99, where bands like Limp Biscuit, you could say bordering on incitement, basically, at the middle of their break stuff song told a very already off crowd that, um, Take all that negative energy and let it out, and they did. And it was, you know, infamously chaotic and people got hurt as a result. Um, SO it's not always a healthy channel for that emotion.

1:00:35 Ricardo Lopes: Yeah, it's definitely a complicated picture because I guess that in the case of certain people it might even Act as a form of catharsis and so they have the catharsis and then they don't feel the need to go out and I mean as Limpis Limpiski say break stuff or hurt people or something like that, but I mean it's just might act as a form of catharsis and also I mean the other thing you're pointing to, I guess is the fact that some of these links established between violent video games or violent music and violent acts, it can be, I mean, the causality might be reversed in the sense that it's violent people playing, playing violent video games and listening to violent music, and so they are. Already violent and the music and the video games are not causing the violence itself and so it might be a personal uh psychological traits.

1:01:37 Daisy Dixon: So. Absolutely, and I and I think we have to be aware, you know, I'm no uh scientist or anything, but obviously, you know, the researchers are gonna have to bear that in mind. And I think as well, another case of this would be, uh, for a novel, so there are also cases of novels. Causing perhaps not necessarily incitement. Um, THERE are some that explicitly incite violence like to genocide and things, but there are others that are kind of more vaguely, uh, connected to the criminality that ensues, the Marquis Dessard's erotic literature, which glamorizes, um. And eroticizes sexual violence. Here, uh, the Marquis Dessard's 120 Days of Sodom, for instance, and his other works from the 18th century, once they were made more available, uh, in the 1950s and 19960s, who got their hands on them? The Moor's murderers. So like Ian Brady, Myra Hindley, they, when police inspected their personal libraries, they found some of the works of the Marquis Assad. And Ian Brady himself said that he identified as one of a Sardian hero. And that they were very much inspired by the Sardian kind of nihilistic philosophy or a kind of at the same time, a libertine philosophy. So there's no right or wrong at all. The only real values in life are pleasure and pain, and that humans should, what it is to live a good life is simply to, uh, find the most extreme pleasure possible and at the expense of harming others. Um, AND so. They then at a later point, uh, murdered 5, sexually assaulted and murdered 5 children and buried them on the moors near Manchester and. It is tempting to say like, you know, did the Marquis Dessard's work cause the Moores murderers? Not really, insofar as it's, it's quite plausible that they would have done those terrible things without having read Sard. But I do think there's something there, the fact that Ian Brady entered that Sardian world with a mind already as it was. I do think entering a world that so, I mean, SAR's writings are very detailed and kind of realistic, um. I think Ian Brady in particular, cos I think he indoctrinated Maira Hindley with Sardjian literature, um, he probably found in that kind of transgressive extreme world, that world of extreme sexual domination. I, I, I wouldn't be surprised if that inspired him or enabled him to. Imagine it more in his mind, so. The causal relation I think is still potentially there. Um, Even if it's going to be more complicated, but I think it's certainly affected his mind in that way.

1:04:44 Ricardo Lopes: Yeah, yeah, I, I mean, Mar is the Sa's work also influenced Pier Paolo Pazzolini's film Salo, and I mean it's, it's an extremely hard watch, but it's a sort of socialist movie in a sense because I, I mean, at least the underlying message there was to denounce the capitalist elites, but I, I, I, I mean, but again, Pazzolini was also a problematic figure in the sense that he seemed to also have some pedophilic tendencies. So I I I mean there are many

1:05:23 Daisy Dixon: problematic figures. There are, and I think this is the issue of like, yes, the Marquis Lassard absolutely inspired avant-garde art, and he inspired this idea of using the sexual body and extreme pornographic scenarios. Uh, TO critique, and this is what 120 Days of Sodom in some interpretations was doing. It was like written in the early rumblings of the French Revolution. It's kind of critiquing the um, More, you know, the uh. Ruling estates, the ruling kind of classes, um, the aristocracy, the, uh, the rules, the clergy, um, and in a way it kind of some people interpret it as a biting satire, um, of these people, these ruling elites who have this kind of unchecked power and corruption. And that's what Salo was doing as well, as you say, it was critiquing capitalist structures that that removes the autonomy of the human being and leaves them as a pure body. And you can use the kind of Sardian aesthetic, that Sardian universe, to make sense of real horrors that have happened since he penned that diabolical tale. So, if you think these artworks are good, as in like they're important, and I think they are in a way. Yes, the Marquis Dessard inspired serial killers, but he also inspired a whole new way of art making, which is probably a good thing. So yeah, it's a tricky one.

1:06:56 Ricardo Lopes: Yeah, so let me ask you another question now, because this is actually a discussion that I've had with friends actually. So can art contribute to oppressive regimes? I mean, because we have this as progressives, we have this sort of idea or we tend to associate art. With progressivism, I mean in the sense that for example, because art in principle is limitless in terms of the different things that it can express and The different art forms out there, there's this idea that, uh, I mean, art is always transgressive. I mean that it, it doesn't align itself with the status quo, but actually that, that's not always the case, right? I mean, particularly, for example, if you look across Europe, there's lots of um architecture out there that was created by Or paid by and for oppressive regimes, right?

1:08:04 Daisy Dixon: Yeah, so I think you're quite right. Like there's this idea that, um, art, its relation to morality should be always to transgress it, and I think there is, um, there is something absolutely to that. But yeah, so the idea that art can oppress, I understand that through the lens of hate speech. So kind of connected to what we were talking about before about causation. And incitement Often when we think of hate speech. It's considered, um, speech that is like contempt of speech er in that targets someone because of their social identity, like their gender or race or um class and so on and religion. Um, AND whilst hate speech traditionally was seen as, um, speech that can incite violence, like incite a riot, for instance, or incite but also cause psychological damage to those targeted by it, and indeed the perpetrators of it as well. Um, PHILOSOPHERS of language in the last sort of 50 or so years have really started looking at, um, inspired by JL Austen in the 1950s, the Oxford philosopher, writing about how speech actually constitutes harm. Um, SO this idea that speech doesn't just represent reality, um, we can actually do actions with our words, and that can range from anything from like everyday things like assertion, questioning, ordering, requesting, all the way through to, um, finding, you know, A jury, um, having a verdict of over someone transforms their social status. We've got state sanctioned speech, um, for instance, like signage in the, uh, in apartheid era saying like whites only signs. This is speech that, um, Oppresses a whole social group because it ranks them as inferior and in legal contexts and indeed non-legal everyday contexts can deprive that group of rights simply in if the speaker has enough authority in various ways, they can actually mold social reality through what it does. And I think a lot of artworks are doing the same thing, they're performing. What these philosophers have called elocutionary acts. So these are the actions that are done in saying something. So it's not really about, I'm saying something and then something happens later later on in the world at a later time, that's of interest here. What's of concern here is what the artwork or the speech is, how it's molding social reality, it's essentially saying, you are, it could be like an order, for instance, or an assertion, like you should. See this person in this negative way, and it gives permission, it's a kind of, it enacts what Mary Kate McGowan calls permissibility facts. With the correct authority, this kind of speech can legitimize poor treatment of that particular social group and, Whilst kind of more straightforward racist, sexist speech, if that's slurs, jokes, or just explicit, um, you know, get out, you're not welcome here or go back to your country, these horrible things. Um, WHILST that can happen in more straightforward speech like that, I think it can also happen, um, through art. And I think that's because, particularly visual art, um, whilst it doesn't employ a conventional language in the same way, it doesn't have a grammar, it doesn't have a vocabulary, but I still think it can act, it can perform these elocutionary acts. Um, AND classic cases of art being oppressive in this way could be anything from. Uh, PARTICULAR traditions in the Italian Renaissance like heroic rape imagery, um, through its romanticization and eroticization of sexual violence. In the book, I argue how that functions as a kind of hate speech against women, um, ranks us as inferior, legitimizes, um. Rape myths and things like that. But then we also have, um, anti-Semitic propaganda, which, as far as I know, goes back to at least the 13th century, all the way through to, uh, Nazi propaganda and of course the kind of, um, awful kind of memes and things that we now see online. Um, BUT also anti-black imagery. And so this is really moving from high so-called high art down to everyday artifacts. So artifacts of the Jim Crow era, for instance, in America, that could range from anything from like cartoons, postcards. Jewelry, trinkets, kind of bric a brac in your like little figurines and things in in people's houses, dolls, toys. These would again act as a kind of dehumanizing speech and in doing that legitimize poor treatment and entrench existing social injustice in that way.

1:13:12 Ricardo Lopes: Right, so, uh, when it comes to separating or the debate around separating the art from the artist and if and when we should do it, I mean, actually in our first conversation we talked a lot about that, so I will also be linking to it in the description below. So, but I would like to ask you a specific question. What if um the kind of immorality that is associated with a particular artist is not expressed in their work. So for example, uh JK Rowling, I mean, she's pretty much a transphobe. I mean, I, I guess that's not debatable at all, but Uh, in Harry Potter, for example, I mean, it's not that it's, it doesn't have any problematic aspects because it certainly does. I mean, uh, for example, when it comes to the treatment of the elves, it, uh, endorses slavery, it endorses fat phobia, it endorses Lukeism because I mean, it's apparent. OK for for JK Rowling to bully people on the basis of them being fat or ugly or something like that, but, but I mean, but that has not at least directly to do with transphobia. I mean, but if we can't find transphobia in the Harry Potter books. I mean, should we, at least in that particular case, try to separate JK Rowling from Harry Potter or not?

1:14:47 Daisy Dixon: Yeah, that's a great question. I think this is what I call a hard case, where you have lots of cases where an artist. This moral character is evident in their art, either explicitly. I'm also interested in how moral character can be expressed in style. So that's when I look at Hitler's paintings, for instance, they don't explicitly depict something anti-Semitic or violent, or incite genocide in that way, but they implicitly have a style that is what I call a kind of proto-Nazi style. I won't get into that now, but like, yeah, this, this kind of JK Rowling case is kind of the other end of the spectrum where for the sake of argument, cos I think some people have perhaps found some transphobia in the Harry Potter novels and films. I do like Harry Potter, but I don't know it that like well enough to know if there's, so let's just assume for the sake of argument there's no evidence of like transphobia in, in the artworks themselves. I think in that case we have a few. Dimensions where I still don't think we can separate the art from the artist insofar as this is still the production, the creation of JK Rowling, and I think in that way, I think it's sort of, some people might think it irrational, but I think, Sometimes people just don't want to be near or engage with an artifact that was created by someone who, uh, whose views you vehemently disagree with and indeed whose views might be considered, um, to be extremely detrimental and harmful, um, to not just trans people, but, you know, anyone like queer community, um. So in that case, I think the disgust or the kind of um resistance we might feel to enjoying it, it can just affect and get in the way of our aesthetic experience. And I think that's fair enough because I do think artworks are fundamentally human creations. And I don't think, you know, Harry Potter didn't drop out of the sky. You know, it wasn't made by some other non-human life form. Like it was made by a person at a particular point in time. Um, SO I think that affecting how you engage with it there is, is reasonable. Um, THERE'S also practical reasons here. So I know that some people don't, will, will be avoiding the new HBO, I think it's HBO series of the new Harry Potter, um. And that's mainly in part the impression I've got, um, isn't because they think, oh, how, you know, JK Rowling being who she is, that's gonna ruin my experience of it. They're doing it out of practical concern that the the money that she's gonna be getting from this will be directly fed into transphobic, um. Uh, GROUPS, and there we have quite an easy decision to make of like a kind of boycott. I don't want my money going towards that cause, so I'm not gonna watch it for that reason. Um,

1:17:52 Ricardo Lopes: YEAH, I think, by the way, do you think that that's a legitimate approach for people to have to decide to boycott particular artists or works of art?

1:18:03 Daisy Dixon: I think when it comes to funding, not choosing where your hard, hard earned money, where which estates it's funding and which causes its funding, I think that is perfectly reasonable. I also think though that people are fundamentally, Like inconsistent, or maybe it's just me, but like I, I went to watch the new Michael Jackson film, and I thought it was, I thought it was incredible. I was like, oh my God, this is amazing, and for a lot of people I think sometimes the love we might have for, not necessarily the artists but like the the, their art that they've given us, a lot of people and I've sort of stumbled into this bizarre world on Instagram at the moment, the algorithm has taken me to, There's, there's enormous amounts of people who are convinced Michael Jackson is innocent, and they are so defensive of him, and I think that's because people loved him so much

1:19:01 Ricardo Lopes: and I, I, I mean when it comes to that, of course I'm not defending Michael Jackson at all, but uh I I'm I just want to say that, I, I mean he was, um, He was acquitted I mean he was acquitted by a jury, so I mean that that's all I have to say about it. I, I'm not saying that I'm not saying that just because of that, nothing happened. I'm just saying that at least in terms of er legal procedures, I mean it was never considered. Absolutely.

1:19:37 Daisy Dixon: So he was never, I think, charged either. I might have to double check that. But yeah, so he, he was, he was never found guilty of of these. The allegations still stand, um, that I know of. And you know, they, when they became particularly public in 2019, some radio stations stopped playing Michael Jackson's songs. But what's curious is now is that I think because What Michael Jackson's art has given us, you know, it broke down racial barriers, it transformed what pop music could be, it transformed like the artistry of a music video, um, that arguably people like Queen sort of started before, but like, um, A lot of people also identify with Michael Jackson's music from a social justice point of view, so a lot of people would say a lot of his songs, um, concern, uh, say like Beat It for instance, about masculinity, about gang culture, the fact that his music video brought together, uh, warring kind of gang, uh, members. These are all undeniably good things and I think because of that, often people's decisions about whether they stop listening to Michael Jackson or not, are gonna be even harder, um, and I think this might be the same with Harry Potter as well. I I've got friends who are trans allies, but they adore Harry Potter, they grew up with it, it's part of their identity, um, so I think we need to be, Um, like I, I was criticized heavily for going to see the Michael Jackson film, um, by, by some friends, um. And I think you know they're they're entitled to that criticism, but I think we need to bear in mind, people, a lot of our people shapes people's sense of their own identity. Um, PHILOSOPHERS talk about us having an aesthetic self, a lot of music and literature can help us. Find ourselves, it can be in a form of escapism when we're kids, um. Yeah, and I don't that doesn't go away automatically just because you feel you ought to boycott a particular artist.

1:21:45 Ricardo Lopes: Well, you know, I guess that we all have some contradictions, right, because I mean I, I'm very much not a traditionalist or a religious person, but I can't stop loving the Lord of the Rings, so, you know.

1:22:01 Daisy Dixon: Yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly, and I think this is the the tricky thing about at the end of the day. We take what we want from an artwork, I do think we need to pay attention to the very real meaning that is there. Like for instance, if you really just really liked Hitler's paintings, because they looked pretty, and a lot of people do think they look pretty, right, they might be a bit crap, but they, you know, they look pretty and peaceful and pleasant to look at. That I'd be like, yeah, OK, but you really ought to know. That actually this is a this is a depraved kind of immoral vision that he's giving us. It's actually very insidious, um. So there, you know, we might, I think we, we're gonna be able to criticize other people for making their artistic choices, what they choose to fill their lives with, um. And it's whether or not they're engaging with the artwork as a whole or if they're just taking it surface level, like oh I just I just really like the sound of Michael Jackson's music, so I'm just gonna carry on listening, it makes me wanna dance, so, but I think they're, you know, Well that's a tricky case anyway, but with say Hitler's paintings, you're not engaging with the artwork fully, and as long as you know that, then you know, I'm not going to stand behind you and police saying you're doing it wrong, kind of thing.

1:23:18 Ricardo Lopes: Yeah, yeah, I, I mean for me personally, another example is Dentist Divine Comedy. I mean, it's just, for example, there's um one of the. Circles, circles of hell, there's arguably homosexuals there and there's also the circle of people who committed suicide, and I mean, of course I don't think that being homosexual is immoral at all, and I also don't condemn people who commit suicide, but I'm also like. But damn,

1:23:53 Daisy Dixon: the poem is so good. Yeah, yeah, and I think this is, this is what philosophers about. I think this is why it's been tricky to bring this debate to the general public. People want very kind of like black and white, sort of almost sensationalist answers, like pro or anti. It's like actually no, artworks, because they're by their nature incredibly rich objects, they're gonna have multiple properties about them. You know, your example there, it's gonna have value. Is an artwork, undeniable value at the same time as having immoral properties, and it's a case, sometimes it's a case of weighing up those properties, like it's immoral immorality is just too much, and it ought not just that it does, but it ought to make us, um, either move away from it or not wish to consume it or indeed condemn it and things like that. Um, BUT you can see even the Marquis of Sars literature has value. But that's not, that's not just to say that is not to justify. Or sanitize the deep immorality within his works.

1:24:57 Ricardo Lopes: So yeah, so when it comes to how we should deal with immoral artists or works of art, I have just two more questions I'd like to ask you. So do you think that censorship can be a solution?

1:25:14 Daisy Dixon: Um, I think censorship, first of all, we need to get clear on what we mean by censorship. So it can mean anything from like suppression of an artwork, like stopping it from being either performed or shown an exhibition or indeed distributed, um. In any kind of form, but it can also mean outright destruction. So in that sense, if an artwork's already been made, and it's incredibly immoral, say it's oppressive or it incites violence or something. I don't think we should censor it in terms of destroying it. Um, AND in part that's because I think even depraved heritage, if you want to call it that, needs to be preserved for lots of reasons. Like I don't think we should be, especially in this day and age, we shouldn't be burning. Adolf Hitler's paintings. And there was on a Jimmy Carr show, a few years ago, an audience voted to destroy various works of art made by moral artists. They had an original watercolor by Adolf Hitler of a church, um, and the audience voted to destroy it, and he lowered it into like a row of chainsaws. I mean, the show was kind of problematic for lots of ways, kind of making a spectacle out of like iconoclasm, which was interesting in itself, but I don't think even Hitler's paintings should be destroyed. I don't think Gauguin's paintings should be destroyed or hidden in vaults, um. Because in part, even artworks that have been incredibly harmful, we need to preserve them, to learn from them, and they can act as a warning for where we're going again, especially with like the constant rise of the far right. A lot of these artworks like anti-Semitic propaganda, they need to be curated and handled sensitively. But to completely destroy them, there's a risk there of dismissing the role that art can play. In, say, genocide and social progress and liberation, um, so I think in that sense, just pure destruction, pure iconoclasm is not the right answer. And we also need to be even cautious about censorship in terms of suppression. Because in the past, the art that's often been censored, um, in that way is the kind of art we were talking about before, art that isn't actually immoral or a danger to society. Um, IT simply violates our social mores, our conventional norms. Um, A lot of queer art, for instance, has been censored across the world, er. You know, 11 example would be, um, in 1928, Radcliffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness novel was banned by UK courts. It wasn't even sexually explicit, I don't think. It's just because it was about a lesbian couple during the First World War. Um, BUT we also have cases like Megumi Gashi in Japan, um, who in 2014 was thrown in jail because she made an artwork in the shape of her own vulva. Um. And, you know, the vulva in Japan is still very, very taboo, whereas penises are perfectly acceptable, um, in society. And so a lot of the art that we wish to censor or suppress or indeed, um, prosecute an artist for making it. It's Just betraying deeper prejudices and biases against that person, and then also we have to be very worried about, Censoring art that's simply voicing, um, an opinion or a view that goes against a particular authoritarian regime, um. Uh, THE Nazi book burnings are a case in point of sort of censorship in the extreme form. They were just silencing dissent from anything that anything was taken to be, um, against the Nazi regime was destroyed. Um, AND this of course can be incredibly dangerous to silencing those important voices. So I think censorship in general we have to be wary of, but I do think in terms of incitement, We are right, it's, you know, if there is clear incitement there, it's, it's correct, it's correct to prosecute those artists. I think it's correct that. Julius Stryker was um charged with incitement to genocide in the Nuremberg trials through the art that he was publishing. Um, SO in a legal way, there's still things that can be done there that might be deemed a kind of censorship, um, or indeed prevention from making the art in the first place. If it's harming animals or humans in the process, then yes, we should stop that.

1:30:11 Ricardo Lopes: OK, so one final question. I mean, leaving just aside for a second, the legality of it, I mean, about whether legally we should prohibit certain kinds of artistic expression or certain kinds of behaviors by artists and all of that. I mean, just normatively, I mean you. You're a philosopher of art. You're an artist and a consumer of art as I am. So do you think that in terms of norms, in terms of how we should normatively approach art and artists, do you think that we should really approach art as if we think or if we assume that should be absolute freedom of expression in art. I mean, because personally I think that sometimes there's a tendency, at least among certain art appreciators, let's say, of putting artists on a pedestal and wherever they explore in their artwork. OR sometimes even whatever kind of behavior they have just because they have a certain social status that you shouldn't question it. Oh, it's he's an artist. I mean, he's doing his thing. I mean, don't bother him. And then we have, we have cases like Gauguin and Picasso and We have, for example, what they did to the actress in The Last Tango in Paris and all of that. So, and, and sometimes people just dismiss it as, 000 it's just art and they're just artists. I mean, don't you think that perhaps sometimes we should be a little bit less permissive of certain kinds of artistic expression?

1:32:12 Daisy Dixon: Yeah, definitely. So I, in in the book and also just generally, I've always been very anti this kind of the genius myth. Like, yes, these artists, you know, are are particular canons, particularly the Western canon, are dominated by, uh, they do have masterpieces. Yes, these artists were incredibly talented. Um. But this idea that they're somehow otherworldly, like they're particularly special human beings that um, get a moral pass and don't, I, I've always been really against that, and I think it's it's it's tendency again to treat. Artworks as somehow sacred. Uh, AND you know, in many cultures, in many groups, artworks are sacred, and I'm obviously completely understand that. But sacred in a way that means they're not connected to the local, the community that consumes it. That's what I don't agree with. Um, THIS idea that art is somehow separate from the world, and that it's this sort of entirely insulated. Um, PRACTICE where anything, anything goes, and I think in terms of, When an artist has done wrong either in the view that they're expressing in the artwork or indeed the very process of creating it was unethical, I just think we should treat them as we would, A human doing just a normal non-artistic action, I think. This is where I guess, you know, complicated art is special in that. They're going back to the kind of first question you asked me, like artworks are these peculiar kind of objects that are rich in meaning. And I think this is the this is the problem going back to this question of censorship. A lot of the time it's really hard, especially with incitement, it's hard to find the artists can kind of easily wiggle their way out of it because it's not straightforward communication a lot of the time. It is a kind of invitation to often a fictional world that can have all sorts of meanings and values that people can glean from it, um. But I think there are still gonna be clear cases where the way it's been made and the and the view it expresses is harmful to society, um, and absolutely we shouldn't be overly permissive just because it's art. And indeed, you know, this is sort of taking in a slightly outdated view about so-called high art. These artworks are no longer locked away in private collections in aristocratic homes. In the dawn of the museum in the 19th century, these artworks were made free in the West to many parts of the general public. Um, THE printing press meant that all sorts of novels and pictures were making their way through across the world. And, Yeah, because of that, it just seems like art is an intimate part of our world. It affects how we treat and see each other. Anything from beautiful paintings to cartoons and um. You know, general artifacts that are sort of on the brink, you know, sort of artworks, but also sort of not, these all these things really shape our moral compass in a way that we have to take seriously what they're doing. But I think the ethics of the ethics of censorship depends on the ethics of the artwork, um. Obviously, clear incitement to genocide shouldn't be permitted, um. But in other cases, if an art if an artwork is expressing a problematic perspective about a person, that's why in the book I suggest perhaps a better solution is a so-called counter speech, um, to kind of disarm and destroy that work, that artwork without physically destroying it. Um, AND that that might be a way to get around this problem of censorship, um. Which has its own problems.

1:36:16 Ricardo Lopes: Mhm. Right. OK, great. So the book is again Depraved, The Story of Dangerous Art, and of course I will be leaving a link to it in the description of the interview. And Dr. Dixon, apart from the book, would you like to tell people where they can find you and the rest of your work on the internet?

1:36:39 Daisy Dixon: Oh, do you mean like not, not me on tour, but you mean my other work that's

1:36:44 Ricardo Lopes: Yeah, if you want to mention social media, your

1:36:48 Daisy Dixon: yeah, yeah, OK, yeah, cool. So yeah, so I'm on Instagram for my sins, um, you can find me just Daisy Louise Dixon, I think, um, on Instagram, and I'm trying to like do more philosophical content on Instagram. Um, I'm also on X again for my sins, um. And I also have some of my articles are out in various academic journals. You can find me on Google Scholar as well for some of the more academic articles I've written. And I'll also be giving talks, um, throughout the country until at least October. Um, SO you'll find that on my Instagram as well, um, where I'm gonna be mostly talking about depraved art.

1:37:30 Ricardo Lopes: Great. So thank you so much for taking the time to come on the show again. I mean, again, I absolutely love the book, so I recommend it to my audience. I, I can't recommend it enough and it's always great to talk with you.

1:37:46 Daisy Dixon: That's great. Thanks so much for having me again, Ricardo. It's always great to have such an in-depth philosophical discussion as well, which is don't, you don't always get uh in other sort of outlets, so this has been great. Thank you.

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