by

JAYE  BELDO

(the following appeared originally in Art Muscle, a Milwaukee, WI.
based 'zine in the mid '90s)


Victim art, an art form which revels in sexual abuse, terminal illness, deformity, even death, has made paintbrushes and carving tools obsolete. Blood, urine, and semen are the lacquers of choice on varnishing day. Morbidity is the metier. The mannerisms of victim art are basic enough: mere expression, contestation, idiosyncrasy, solipsism and perpetual invective. Victim artists are quick to loathe the elements of  fine art:Quality, depth, beauty, compositional coherency and aesthetic integrity. Most disturbing of all, victim artists wrongly assume that they are, ‘immune to criticism and doubt’ as Robert Hughes observes in his worthwhile book: Culture of Complaint: The Fraying of America. Most art critics avoid challenging victim artists, for criticism that would possibly lead to a more catholic awareness in an atmosphere of tolerance that currently does not exist. is now branded as discrimination. No one dares speak out rationally against such a taboo subject as victimism for fear of being labeled a victimizer. Critics and artists alike, i.e., those who still believe in craft, hard work, self-effacement and transcendence furtively harbor their resentment. They too have been intimidated into muteness before the guilt inducing spectacle of victim art. As a result of these bewildering cultural inhibitions, the art world has become a parody of the Jerry Springer show with little  protest from culture critics. Victim art beckons us to pass through an entrada to embrace the spectacle of tragi-tainment, where skeletons from the closet are showcased with tactless fanfare. Tragi-tainment has done little that is practical to lessen the real suffering of the oppressed and marginalized as it intends to do. In the spirit of praxis, John Grierson once said, “Art is not a mirror, it is a hammer.” Sadly, the hammer has been replaced by the hang-up. Yet the political utility of the hang-up has still to be demonstrated. With the absence of use value, the public becomes more and more distracted, fixated on the mere stagecraft of victimhood. In the words of Arlene Croce, in her January 1, 1995 New Yorker review of Bill T. Jones ‘Still/Here’: “...victimhood is a kind of mass delusion that has taken hold of previously responsible sectors of our culture.”




Chart by Ruby JB

    Grant agencies have been pressured to turn into welfare agencies. They too have been swayed by the delusion that victim art is esthetically as well as socially redeeming. Recently, an arts organization sent out postcards with a plea to save the NEA from impalement on the pikes of conservative republicans. Recipients were asked to send the postcards to Newt Gingrich and his allies. It seemed that this organization was threatened not in terms of an assault on freedom of expression as it claimed, but in terms of their welfare agency going short on funding. The mass delusion spoken of by Croce seems to be making victim arts administration equally irreproachable. Not many grants organizations dare to defer those who assume that being crippled, a minority, HIV positive, or flaunting some unorthodox affectional preference, is the ticket to artistic acclaim and financial gain. Such deference is branded as elitist, sexist, and racist. As a result, it is talent and artistic excellence that have been most marginalized in this game.


Karen Finley

"It doesn't matter if you don't
have an ounce of talent."


Most warping is victim art’s agenda to make banal misery into artful surreality. After a broad sampling of so much victim art, it would be hard to pass through hospital wards, nursing homes, prisons, orphanages and even morgues without considering them to be rather large and looming art galleries. Picture it, if you will: the opening of a new 200 patient show. Wine and Cheese near the nurses station. Each hospital room an atelier. Patrons and critics tour cancer and Alzheimer wards. Eventually the doctors and nurses, quick  to opportunize on the trend, proclaim themselves artists and begin jockeying for grants and recognition as well.

Missing in victim art is the notion of genuine sacrifice. The origin of the word ‘victim’ comes from the Latin, uictirna
meaning a sacrificial  victim, which is akin to meaning, consecrated, holy. Victim art, without sacrifice, is simply a gesture of futility and nothing more. Therefore it cannot be consecrated as having some socially redeeming value when it so closely adheres to the canons of futility. What has happened to the sense of sacrifice that once made great and lasting art? In T.S.  Eliot’s essay, “Tradition and the Individual Talent”, the dead white American expatriate observed: “The Progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.” Victim art by contrast enshrines personality, it does not transcend it. If pain equals personality, then pain itself can never be effaced, for personality is what is most valued. No genuine healing can take place. Futility is thus aggravated.

Laura Marble, a Minneapolis based writer and political activist, a woman who has been wheelchair bound for over four years as a result of exposure to insecticides, comments on victim art:

People need to quit blaming each other and find out why they are vulnerable, what is their weakness, their own hangups. . .dogmatism. . .whatever it is. As long as they are so quick to keep blaming everybody else. .they’re not interested in making changes.. .they’re not only discrediting themselves, they’re denying themselves.

Great strides can be made for both artist, critic and art audience alike if tacit assumptions about suffering, about blame and denial can be explored. No longer should someone who refuses to affect suffering be equated with elitism or removal from political and socio-economic reality. Perhaps this should be the role of the art critic at present time, a calling to find something beneficial within all this futile morbidity that victim art promotes.

A healing art needs to come in place. Perhaps beauty, transcendence, all things branded ‘elitist’ can be reincorporatedi nto a lastinq art of compassion. An art form that will serve as a catalyst to make ourselves whole, integral and healthy once again. Perhaps an art form that will actually re-empower us. We can, once again, appreciate the integrity of Van Gogh’s works, with a fresh perception undistorted by victim ideology. We can gain an understanding of what redeeming value self effacement and transcendence  has. Van Gogh sacrificed his personality and transcended his victimness to make an art which will far outlive anything that victim artists  will ever offer. His paintings will always radiate wholeness and burn with eternal
elan. His masterpieces will survive the digital cannibalizations by artists such as Yasumasa Morimura. 



Yasumasa Morimura


Van Gogh was a victim, ‘suicided by society’ as Antonin Artaud observed in his passionate essay on the painter. If we look upon Van Gogh’s works as an revivifying example to strive for in our future, we can create an art which is resplendent with what Bernard Berensor called. ‘life enhancement’.

Victim from Lava Cocktail on Vimeo.