Art That Irritates

Discomfort as measure.

There exists a kind of consensus that great art should move you, should touch you, should make you feel growth. That sounds pleasant. But I believe it is the reverse. Great art irritates you.

Susan Sontag noted that we always try to interpret art, as if we must free ourselves from it by assigning it meaning. But the power of real art lies precisely in what it refuses to explain. It stands there and makes you uneasy. You do not know why. You feel uncomfortable, uncertain, displaced.

This differs fundamentally from crafted beauty. A beautiful landscape painting can be pleasant. It can offer comfort. But it will not irritate you, because you have understood it quickly. You recognize the pattern, you accept the logic of the composition, and you rest in that understanding.

Artwork that truly works, by contrast, turns against that rest. A portrait by Francis Bacon irritates because it is familiar and simultaneously distorted. You recognize a human, but you also recognize that this human has been smashed. Lucian Freud painted beside his nude model, without idealization, without softening, and every shame of the body becomes visible. That sounds unpleasant. That is also the point.

There is a difference between irritation and confusion. Confusion is when you do not understand something. Irritation is when you understand that it contradicts your understanding. A work by James Turrell, in which light behaves in ways that disturb your expectations of space, irritates your scientific mind. That is why it works.

The art that brings money, that is popular, that hangs in living rooms, is usually art that comforts. It is decoration that expresses an opinion you already held. But real art is art that disturbs. It asks something of you. It demands that you reconsider your position.

What struck me about Turrell was that I stood in his room for an hour and felt my perception shifting. That was not pleasant. That was uncomfortable. And that was precisely why it was art.

Sources: Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation (1966); James Elkins, What Painting Is (2000); Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud catalogue (Tate Modern)