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Well, it's not aesthetically pleasing. It looks like a jumble of ugly, mishappen, misproportioned figures. It's supposed to look like that.
Right, because it is meant to invoke the suffering of people in a city that had been bombed. So of course it isn’t aesthetically pleasing. So, perhaps good art does not have to be aesthetically pleasing. Nor does it have to elevate the human spirit.
They could've shown a mother mourning at her dead child and bombed house, they could've shown people laughing, crying and having mental breakdowns in an air raid shelter... There are enormous numbers of options available. That would've invoked the suffering of people being bombed without looking the way Picasso does.
Art can be aesthetically pleasing and still confronting. You can get pathos from paintings, that can elevate the human spirit. If you can't tell, I reject the notion that Picasso produced good art, know that I'm in the minority and don't care.
The point is that, however a work of art depicts human suffering, it is not going to be uplifting and aesthetically pleasing. If it is, it probably is not doing a very good job of evoking the emotions associated with such suffering.
I can often look at a piece of art, be it sculpture, painting, what have you, and immediately know whether the artist hates humanity or not. The purpose of art may be to disturb the comfortable and comfort the disturbed, or however it goes, but I don't care for art when it is clear to me that whoever made it hates us all and would consign us all to despair. It is possible to show human ugliness without hating all humans, to reveal pain while acknowledging that it is pain--even to show despair without suggesting that despair is the just lot in life for all of us, or even for the despairing soul who is depicted. I never cared, for example, for Joel Peter Witkin's work, though he was celebrated in some circles. The term "uplifting" suggests a certain saccharine aesthetic that I think may not capture the right idea.
Anime, the category you are looking for is anime.
I'm only half-joking, by the way.
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Where is it written that suffering requires grotesque mishappen faces and inhuman bodies? What about clear human faces or expressions?
Take this: https://old.reddit.com/r/PropagandaPosters/comments/69vilr/north_korean_museum_painting_depicting_torture_of/
It's perfectly clear what's going on, you can actually interpret it in justifiable ways. Korean wearing white for purity, the composition of how they're all staring at her with malign intent, the guy with the cigarette casually contemptuous and approving of his colleague's hard work. Tongs being heated up for more torture.
Or take half of Caravaggio's work, lots of suffering there! But it's also clear, you've got light and darkness, you've got colour, you've got proper human faces and emotions. His work is not a giant mess of disconnected, ill-shaped images.
Or this - clear emotion, realistic imagery.
https://media.timeout.com/images/105652224/750/422/image.jpg
It's far better than Guernica, which isn't saying much. Art should be intelligible, better yet readily intelligible. Guernica is not clear or intelligible, you see a bunch of warped, distorted figures and animals bashing eachother or scrabbling around. The interpretation is absolutely not 'perfectly clear'. If you showed it to someone who'd never seen or heard of Guernica, they couldn't tell you it meant 'war is bad'. Maybe it means that chaos is bad, that there needs to be strong leadership and rigid discipline in society. We only know what it means from context and the title.
If you show someone your art and their first instinct is 'what is this mess' then you've failed. Anyone could immediately tell you the meaning of the Nork propaganda or the other image I mentioned. Even more staggering is that the Nork actually bothered to use some artistic skills beyond throwing shapes on the page. Composition. Colour. Shadow. Vaguely realistic faces!
You're the one who's been saying that negative emotions need grotesque and deliberately broken imagery to be fully expressed, which isn't the case. A corpse can be aesthetically pleasing, if there's good composition and care shown in how its placed. Consider Napoléon on the Battlefield of Eylau.
No, I didn’t. Not once. I literally said the exact opposite in the post you are responding to. I said that the depiction of suffering cannot be uplifting and aesthetically pleasing. You are the one making claims about what types of images must be included.
The theme of Napoléon on the Battlefield of Eylau is not human suffering. It is a celebration of Napoleon.
You need to look more closely. It literally includes a depiction of a mother holding a dead child, which you said was the "correct" way to depict suffering.
Are you SURE that Guernica does not employ composition? And colour? That is a requirement of good art? Have you never seen a film noir film? Has it occurred to you that Picasso used greys and blacks to reinforce the tone of the subject? See, eg, Schindler's List.
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