True or not, it highlights something art has been doing since the first Neanderthal drew a pair of boobs on a cave wall. Art shocks us. It always has, and it always will. Exhibit B? You know what they were doing when they saw the equivalent of the first home movie? They were pummeling the human rights out of Algeria and invading Madagascar.
Is it because most middle-class art enjoyers believe art should be sanitized as a thin veneer over the daily savagery that is inherent in capitalist society? Is it because people that work for a living prefer their art to mindlessly entertain after a long day at the office? Literature has gone the same way. Violent and full of adult content though they may be, no piece of art deserves to be written off solely because of its content.
Nor should a particularly gory piece of literature or film deserved to be remembered for gratuitous gore alone looking at you, remake of The Evil Dead! Tons of art has been produced and a lot of it is crap. Sometimes artists try to disguise that crap with some sort of shock factor and in the end produce momentarily shocking crap. Reading them may not always be pleasant, but they are all worthwhile reads.
They deserve your attention. They deserved to be discussed. They deserved to be picked up by you at your local independent bookstore. If you can make it to the end of them, they just might widen your understanding of what art is.
Crossed Vol. Technically, the first entry on this list is a comic book. Some people might get thrown off by that, those same people also like smelling their own farts because the odor reminds them of the quality of their artistic taste.
