In late 19th century England, Oscar Wilde popularized aestheticism,
also known as art-for-art’s-sake – the idea that art, that
beauty, should not be a vehicle for morality or truth, but an end
in-and-of-itself. Rothko and Jackson Pollock enthroned the idea,
creating paintings that are barely graded panels of color or wild
splashes. Today, pop culture is aestheticism’s true heir, from
the perfect charismatic emptiness of Ocean’s Eleven to the
hyper-choreographed essentially balletic movements in the best
martial arts movies. But aestheticism has a dark core, one that
Social Justice Activists are now gathering to combat, revealing the
damaging ideology reflected in or concealed by our most beloved pop
culture icons. Taking Bryan Fuller’s television version of
Hannibal “The Cannibal” Lecter as its main text – and taking
Žižek-style illustrative detours into Malcolm in the Middle, Dark
Knight Rises, Harry Potter, Interview with a Vampire, Dexter and
more – this book marshals Walter Pater, Camille Paglia,
Nietzsche, the Marquis de Sade, Kant and Plato, as well as Dante,
Shakespeare, Milton, Blake, Baudelaire, Beckett, Wallace Stevens
and David Mamet to argue that Fuller’s show is a deceptively
brilliant advance of aestheticism, both in form and content – one
that investigates how deeply art-for-art’s-sake, and those of us
who consciously or unconsciously worship at its teat, are
necessarily entwined with evil.
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