The Dark Arts

I agree with Vahaken Mouradian’s disdain for the art generated by so-called artificial intelligence (“Don’t Rage against the Machine,” January 23), but I take exception to his claim that art must invoke darkness — or, in his quote from Agnes Callard, that “the purpose of art is to see ‘evil.’”

Having little appetite for children’s music, I can’t speak to Metallica’s “Master of Puppets” (a song mentioned by Mr. Mouradian), but plenty of great compositions of serious music are very memorable and moving while steering well clear of darkness and evil. I’ll mention just three examples out of many thousands: Handel’s exhilarating Dixit Dominus, Barber’s sublime (but entirely free of terror) Adagio, and Bernstein’s joyous Candide overture. If you’d like examples even more of the moment, I’m happy to draw your attention to any of my own music (www.karenamrhein.com).

I tire of the oft-repeated claim that true art must reveal the worst of humanity. The worst of humanity is easily seen everywhere we look, without the aid of art. The fundamental purpose of art is to entertain — nothing more exalted than that. It can also move our hearts with sublime sadness and with joy and with exhilaration. The best art does that, but it certainly does not celebrate ugliness, terror, and evil.

Karen Amrhein

Composer

Via email

Vahaken Mouradian responds: I’m grateful to Ms. Amrhein for raising a question that, in various forms, other careful readers have, too. Art shouldn’t “celebrate” the ugly and the evil, she says, and it typically doesn’t. But what art uniquely can do is defang and offer for contemplation things that, in nonartistic contexts, repel us. Daily evils — loneliness, boredom, bad luck — are ever present, but we do our best to avoid their glare. On the page or on canvas, there’s the safety to make eye contact with these congenital elements of the human condition. (Why should we care to do so? Because they’re congenital elements of the human condition.)

Ms. Amrhein might consider the possibility that some of her favorite music is, in Burkean terms, beautiful and not sublime. This wouldn’t entail that any such art is bad (much of AI-produced art isn’t bad either). It would simply mean that it’s different in kind from what is awe-rousing. But Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings is sublime because it’s mournful and melancholic, as strings in a minor key tend to be. Handel’s Dixit Dominus is a psalm. It’s jauntier than the Adagio, but who can deny its grandeur? Besides, religious art invokes terror especially: The omnipotent and the eternal — and our awareness that we’re neither — is arresting. We can turn to art for many reasons, entertainment among them, but to see terror without being terrified, we can’t turn anywhere else.