DivineDemento

J.G Ballard’s infamous cult novel Crash shocked and dismayed many readers upon release. It depicts a world where the barriers between sex, cruelty and technology have been broken down, as a group of traumatised fanatics explore the latent sexual potential of the car Crash. In 1973, this assessment of the modern word seemed impossibly bleak. Now, in 2019, the inextricable link between sex and machinery has become a worrying reality. Introduction - 'A Brutal, Erotic Novel' ‘This author is beyond psychiatric help – do not publish!’ This infamous line, quoted in maybe every article written about Crash, is apparently the reaction from a publisher’s wife upon reading her husband’s edition of J.G Ballard’s definitive post-modern novel. As hysterical as this reaction may seem, it was indicative of the novel’s reception at the time. Crash is a wilfully challenging book – mixing graphic descriptions of car-crash sustained injuries with equally graphic sex scenes, all if which ...

Conversations around social justice and social awareness are more centralized in pop culture than ever before in 2019. In our fraught political climate, we have made a shift towards consuming art that is socially conscious, and we are beginning to hold our artists accountable for the intentions behind their work. So where in this approach do we canonise the long and troubled history of art which is purposefully shocking, debauched and intentionally immoral? Perhaps since man first daubed figures on cave walls, the greater purpose of art has been a central debate in societies throughout history and across the world. Across most cultures, we accept that art should serve some sort of moral purpose - it should enlighten us, educate us, comfort us or invigorate us – all of this, of course, relevant to the standards and moral codes of the society wherein the discussion is taking place. Running parallel to this set of beliefs therefore is the inevitability of art inciting moral panic –...