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This doesn't make any sense to me. Why must "real" art be traumatic? Thinking back to all my most transcendent artistic experiences -- standing inside a gothic cathedral for the first time on a sunny day, attending a production of Beethoven's 9th on Christmas Eve in a beautiful concert hall with perfect accoustics, my first time crowdsurfing at the Warped Tour -- these were the exact opposite of traumatic for me. They didn't take anything away from me. They absolutely filled me with joy. They may have been emotionally overwhelming experiences, but not in any way that I would ever describe as traumatic.
Let me first clarify that I have no interest in policing the boundary between real art and not-real art. I find little use in the distinction between "art" and "entertainment" as well. I think there are simply good and bad works. Even "lowly" works can have many interesting things to appreciate. But there are nonetheless higher and lower works, greater and smaller works - and something about what I said rings true about the greatest works, I believe. It speaks to art's authentic purpose, its highest aim that all the minor tributaries flow into.
Art is the attempt to elucidate the unnameable. It reaches beyond the limits of discursive thought - the logos gives way to Kant's thing-in-itself, Wittgenstein's "the mystical", Lacan's das Ding. All religious and esoteric traditions recognize the element of dread that is inherent in any attempt to transcend this limit. There is the warmth of God's infinite love, yes - but also the vertigo of contemplating God's infinite mind. "And he said, Thou canst not see my face: for there shall no man see me, and live."
Contra the later existentialists, Kierkegaard quite perceptively noted in The Sickness unto Death that existential dread is a religious attitude, not an atheistic one. If the world has no meaning and death is the end, then you have nothing to fear, right? You just die and that's it. It's eternal life where things start to get scary. Now the salvation of your immortal soul is on the line. Now there are stakes. Thus there is no religious cosmology that one can seek final refuge in - the traumatic core of reality persists in either case.
Art remains for us a regulative ideal, an unrealized potential, a mere sign. We are still waiting for an art that will fulfill the promise of art. The history of "aesthetic feelings" hitherto is not an ideal to aspire to, but a dream from which one must awaken.
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I agree with all this. Even my darker artistic experiences — such as spending a few hours with Goya’s black paintings in the Prado in Madrid — were the opposite of traumatic. It was moving, transformative. It changed me in some way, fundamentally. Maybe that’s another definition of trauma, but it’s not one I recognise.
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