Arbus’s work is a good instance of a leading tendency of high art in capitalist
countries: to suppress, or at least reduce, moral and sensory queasiness. Much
of modern art is devoted to lowering the threshold of what is terrible. By
getting us used to what, formerly, we could not bear to see or hear, because it
was too shocking, painful, or embarrassing; art changes morals—that body of
psychic custom and public sanctions that draws a vague boundary between what is
emotionally and spontaneously intolerable and what is not. The gradual
suppression of queasiness does bring us closer to a rather formal truth—that of
the arbitrariness of the taboos constructed by art and morals. But our ability
to stomach this rising grotesqueness in images (moving and still) and in print
has a stiff price. In the long run, it works out not as a liberation of but as a
subtraction from the self: a pseudo-familiarity with the horrible reinforces
alienation, making one less able to react in real life. What happens to people’s
feelings on first exposure to today’s neighborhood pornographic film or to
tonight’s televised atrocity is not so different from what happens when they
first look at Arbus’s photographs.
