"The ghoulish cruelties in the Disasters of War are meant to awaken, shock, wound the viewer. Goya's art, like Dostoyevski's, seems a turning point in the history of moral feelings and of sorrow - as deep, as original, as demanding. With Goya, a new standard for responsiveness to suffering enters art. (And new subjects for fellow feeling: as in, for example, his painting of an injured laborer being carried away from a building site.) the account of war's cruelties is fashioned as an assault on the sensibility of the viewer. The expressive phrases in script below each image comment on the provocation. While the image, like every image, is an invitation to look, the caption, more often than not, insists on the difficulty of doing just that. A voice, presumably the artist's, badgers the viewer: can you bear to look at this? . . . "(Susan Sontag. Regarding the Pain of Others. p 44 -5)


:: note :: . . . maybe spend some time with the naughtiness . . . the Chapman Brothers may have something to say beyond sensationalism . . . they took me to Goya . . . an example of educating the imagination in the tradition of Artaud's Theater of Cruelty . . .

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