The Art Snob Archive

Ballard - March 10/06

Sexual Deviance, Car Crashes, and Ronald Reagan

The wide and wonderful world of J.G. Ballard

Torquil Campbell, lead singer of Canadian indie heartthrobs ‘Stars’, once said in an Exclaim magazine interview that, “if there are no negative reactions to your art, you’re making something that isn’t all that interesting.”

Art snobs, dear readers, eat up this philosophy like it is caviar of the finest grain.

We love to be associated with the obscene, the provocative. This is why we allow portraits of the Virgin Mary to be smeared with cow feces and placed in our galleries. It may also explain why experimental noise bands like Wolf Eyes, who sing about “urine burn,” gain a devoted following. Art snobs are inherently drawn to that which repulses every one else. It is part of our “superior sensitivity,” our much larger brains, and our never-ending need to be distinct from the unwashed masses.

Take for example David Cronenberg’s 1996 film Crash. This is not the enlightening, Oscar-winning film about the problem of racism in modern society, no, this is a movie about people who get sexual pleasure from car accidents. The film, which follows a psychologically-disturbed group of people on their quest to merge sexuality with machinery, was condemned as “sick and evil” by critics, banned from theatres in Britain and crippled by an NC-17 rating in the United States. But the Cannes festival, that French utopia of uppity film snobs, commended Crash for its ‘daring audacity and originality’. Indeed, a particularly cultivated friend told me recently that to “not appreciate Cronenberg’s Crash was to forsake your claim to the title of ‘art snob’.”

If it is necessary for the art snob to associate with the perverse and the provocative, it seems likely that the work of British writer J.G. Ballard should find a home on our burdened bookshelves. One of the most important writers to address the mechanization and dehumanization of society in the modern era, Ballard was in fact the author of the novel that inspired Cronenberg’s film. He also wrote Empire of the Sun, which was turned into a blockbuster movie by box-office whore Steven Spielberg, and thus will be ignored.

Ballard’s Crash is a portrait of technological dystopia, filled to the brim with nihilism, sado-masochism, and a plethora of disturbing imagery: “The lungs of elderly men punctured by door-handles; the chests of young women impaled on steering-columns; the cheek of handsome youths torn on the chromium latches of quarter-lights.” One publisher, after reading the novel, proclaimed that Ballard “is beyond psychiatric help.” The English writer’s other work does not deny the publisher’s diagnosis. 1969’s Atrocity Exhibition, a fragmented critique of media culture containing chapters with titles such as “Why I want to F*** Ronald Reagan” and “Plan for the Assassination of Jackie Kennedy”, so offended bookseller Nelson Doubleday that he demanded the entire press run be shredded. Vermillion Sands, a brilliantly written short-story collection about a desert resort inhabited by eccentric and insane celebrities, was so erotic in its portrayal of technology’s grotesque manifestations that it disappeared off bookshelves into obscurity. Each of Ballard’s novels becomes a struggle against nausea, at least for the average person.

The true art snob is immune to Ballard’s graphic perversity. So smart, so cultured, so enlightened, there is nothing we haven’t seen before. The hardest of the hardcore, art snobs are able to look past the blood and genitals practically unfazed, to see the message underneath. We, like J.G. Ballard, subscribe to the idea that the best way to enlighten people is to upset them. Art snobs can thus appreciate the image of a man making love to a wound his wife earned in a car accident, because we see it for what it really is, a commentary on the effect of modern technology and disaster media on the human psyche. I mean, isn’t it obvious?

Fellow British writer Martin Amis described Ballard as “quite unlike anyone else; indeed, he seems to address a different - a disused - part of the reader's brain." For providing this intellectual challenge, art snobs can latch on to Ballard and love him forever. He is a perfect testament to the ideal that the best art is the type that repulses its beholder, and by separating the intellectually enlightened from the weak-stomached majority, Ballard has given art snobs the greatest gift they could ever ask for: something to hold over everyone else.

posted by HLL @ Friday, March 24, 2006