Blog Post #4

"...figurative, cartoonish idiom may be the most powerful means of representing modern atrocity."

I enjoyed Fineman's insights into Botero's work in the slideshow, but this last sentence has to be a joke, right? I have read it over a number of times, and it makes absolutely no sense to me. I respect what Botero is trying to with his paintings, but nothing can more powerfully represent the atrocities of Abu Ghraib than the actual photos of the atrocities Abu Ghraib . Do you guys remember when they came out? It was a one of the finest examples of truth being stranger than fiction. No painting, poem, movie, song, etc. of what happened can be more powerful than showing what actually happened.

The real pictures are so disturbing that looking at them (or even recalling them years later) makes me sick to stomach. They're so repulsive that most people do not want to look at them. Maybe Botero's pudgy, cartoonish figures make the pictures easier to look at. You can study them and take time to comtemplate what happened. This might be beneficial, but there are some things that we run the risk of being too intellectual about.

I would challenge anyone to look at any of the real photos for more than 5 or 6 seconds without looking away. They are so repulsive that you instantly want to block them out. In this way, they do not lead you to meditate on the nature of evil the way one of Botero's paintings might, but aren't there some things that do not need to be meditated upon? Aren't some things so clearly evil and amoral that in snap we can form an opinion on the topic? This is the way the Abu Ghraib photos are to me.

Certainly, I am not one for typically making rash judgments, but in this case it applies. We are all English majors. We like to engage our brains and think philosophically, but sometimes, you have to trust your gut. To quote Woody Allen, "The brain is the most overrated of all organs...Everything really valuable has to enter you through a different opening, if you'll forgive the disgusting imagery."

An overload of stimulus continually at our fingertips has given us a tendency to over-intellectualize. How else could someone think "...figurative, cartoonish idiom may be the most powerful means of representing modern atrocity"?