What I love the most about Maggie Nelson’s writing is that she doesn’t tell you what to think. So much information surrounding us these days is invective or polemic. Propaganda and pat answers on all sides. Nelson resides in a realm of complications, wherein much is up to question and examination, and where answers do not need to be simple or easy or definitive.

This quality of her thinking is on full display in her examination of cruelty in art, in various forms: Artaud, performance art, the Viennese Actionists’ films, Mary Gaitskill, torture porn, Georges Bataille, news footage, Sylvia Plath, the Marquis de Sade, and more. Cruelty toward self, toward audience, toward subject, toward collaborators. Along the way she questions whether art can be cruel, what forms cruelty takes, what effects it produces, and how gender interacts with and informs (or does not) the cruelty in which people engage.


I learned a lot about artists with whose work I had only passing or no familiarity, enjoyed an incisive look at artists whose work I’ve read, and discovered lots of names and books to Google. I ended up with a deeper appreciation for forms of art I might have dismissed, and a more informed sense of the aesthetics of shock and provocation. I also deeply enjoyed the reading (listening, as I did the audiobook) experience Nelson offers, dense and perhaps disturbing as it is. This is my cup of spiked tea.