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Articles

Beauty versus Evil

Stuart Greenstreet asks whether we may judge a work to be artistically good even if we know it to be morally evil.

“It is not an accident that the artistic manifestations of Fascism were banal in the extreme,” John Casey writes in The Language of Criticism (p.54, 1966). It is not an accident, the argument goes, because works of art take their character from their makers. Art draws on what is distinctive about how artists view the world and the attitude that they take towards it. So Fascist art, for instance, is bound to be bad because it instantiates Fascist values and a Fascist worldview.

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