David Carr and A. O. Scott discuss the turmoil that art and speech can create in the world.  In more than two dozen plays over two decades the New York playwright (and Pulitzer Prize finalist) Adam Rapp has presented a dark emotional realism fleshed out with generous doses of sex, violence and bodily fluids. In an e-mail conversation Mr. Rapp, whose new play, “Through the Yellow Hour,” just opened at New York’s Rattlestick Playwrights Theater, talks about the importance of kicking the audience in the shins, why it’s become harder to get a reaction out of audiences, and the scene that has most shocked him. These are excerpts from the conversation.  Q. Admirers and detractors of your work alike have cited its visceral, confrontational aesthetic. Is shocking the audience something you deliberately seek to do?  A. Early in my career I was really interested in putting actions onstage that I’d never seen before. I would imagine a moment that would be almost impossible to pull off, like someone urinating, or shooting up with insulin and leaving the needle dangling in his side. This excited me simply because when you encounter these kinds of moments, and they’re executed well, the audience likely forgets they’re sitting in a theater. That’s always been my goal: to make people get so lost in the play they think they’ve actually happened upon something. The greatest sin in the theater is boredom.  Q. Are there any particular playwrights who showed you what these kinds of moments might look like?  A. In my early 20s I was reading plays by Edward Bond, Sarah Kane, Caryl Churchill and Harold Pinter. I wanted to reach the same level of intensity that I encountered in their work because I was rarely experiencing this when I went to the theater. Everything seemed so safe and presentational. I was excited by the possibility of changing the nervous system of the audience, and I still am. But now, many plays later, I find that whether it’s sex, drugs, urination or violence, not only does it have to be well executed, but it has to be organically justified by the narrative. Otherwise it will feel gratuitous, and the audience will lean away from the play, and that kind of death is almost as bad as boredom.  Sara Krulwich/The New York Times  Christopher Denham, left, Gary Wilmes and Lisa Joyce in Mr. Rapp’s play “Red Light Winter.”  Q. Has it become harder to push an audience past its comfort zone?  A. I think it is harder to shock audiences than it used to be because now one can go on the Internet and have a very intimate experience with sex and violence. The immediate access is sort of stunning. Today I’m less interested in writing toward a shocking moment than in writing a good play, but I still think getting an audience out of their comfort zone is hugely important. I refuse to see theater simply as entertainment. It should challenge an audience and push them away from what TV generally gives them. And sometimes a good punch to the stomach or a kick to the shins can be a very good thing. The English playwright Howard Brenton once said, “Theater’s a real bear pit.” I believe in this very much.  Q. Is there a play you recall as having particularly shocked you?  A. One of the most shocking moments I’ve seen in the theater involved a letter. In Martin McDonagh’s “The Beauty Queen of Leenane,” Maureen, the 40-year-old spinster who is living with Mag, her embittered mother, receives a love letter from Pato, a middle-aged construction worker. Maureen isn’t home when the letter arrives, and after Mag is left alone with it for a few minutes she starts the stove. We think she’s going to make herself some tea, but she winds up throwing the letter into the oven. The moment was so shocking — the snapping shut of that oven door — that the Broadway audience gasped and cried as if they were watching a slasher moment in a horror movie. McDonagh had done such a good job front-loading Maureen’s loneliness and frustration, and this last chance at love was destroyed by one simple swift action. It broke my heart. and I had knots in my stomach for the rest of the play.  Four New York Times critics — Roberta Smith, Ben Brantley, A. O. Scott and Alastair Macaulay— are chatting about the role of shock in art: how it works, how it has changed and why it’s still necessary. Jennifer Schuessler moderates.  JENNIFER SCHUESSLER, REPORTER: Ben writes that “shock, if we’re still using that word, is visceral.” Alastair, I think you’re the one who got us talking about semantics. Would you agree? And what are some of the shocks (jolts? surprises?) you’ve felt most deeply in your gut?  ALASTAIR MACAULAY, CHIEF DANCE CRITIC: Shock is, as Ben says, visceral; but it’s also entirely contextual. The greatest shock I recall in over 34 years as a critic lay in a radical non sequitur. It was the world premiere of Harold Pinter’s “Ashes to Ashes” (1996), a play for one male-female couple, Rebecca and Devlin. Rebecca is recalling her relationship with an authority figure in a state where genocide occurred. At one point she describes how she once watched this man she loved walk down a row of screaming mothers and tear from them the bundles that contained their babies. A silence follows. Then Devlin replies: “Did you see Kim and the kids?” On first experience of the play that nonanswer was shocking — it felt like walking straight into a wall — because Devlin sounded so callously indifferent to Rebecca’s appalling testimony. As I revisited the play over weeks and months, I came to understand that the opposite was also true. Rebecca’s testimony is a form of delusion or psychosis, and Devlin’s question about Kim and the kids is an attempt (successful, in the short term) to draw her back into the everyday world she knows.  Some of the shock of his line endures, though, like an extreme discord in music, it is on so strikingly different a wavelength. Rebecca, however confused about her own life, is attuned to some of the great horrors of recent times. At no point does Devlin show the least largeness of spirit. And so it becomes implicit that this fascist figure in Rebecca’s mind is her nightmare version of Devlin, her own petty domestic tyrant. As a meeting of the political and the personal it remains for me a breathtaking play: not Pinter’s most perfect but his greatest.  Devlin’s line, however, isn’t a front-page shock. I remember how two London critics were so aghast after the world premiere of Sarah Kane’s “Blasted” that, talking outside the theater afterward, they decided to propose to their newspapers that their outrage should be front-page rather than arts-page. Whether or not they were right — one of those critics died a few years later, the other has since recanted about Kane — this reminds us that shock isn’t solely a spontaneous reaction.  After the first feeling of being taken aback, we then make decisions. Outrage isn’t just instinctive; it too is an act, a form of performance. The people who booed and heckled during the premiere of Stravinsky’s “Rite” decided to fight; and probably Diaghilev had spent weeks preparing Paris for battle. (He well knew how proud Paris was of its tradition of scandalous first nights.)  Usually we in the West decide these days to play it cool, even blasé, about displays of nakedness, sexual deviation, musical loudness and discord. Cannibalism, genocide, torture, heresy: these are among the chief shockers today. Pinter at the time of “Ashes to Ashes” was friends with Sarah Kane; I’ve often wondered whether his play wasn’t his way of taking the horrors of her “Blasted” and connecting them to the shocks of his own personal force fields.  At the moment such a battle — the shock of heresy — is being fought about “Innocence of Muslims.” I remember not only the brouhaha about “The Satanic Verses” but also “Monty Python’s Life of Brian,” which in 1979 was made to sound the ultimate in bad taste.  Now “Life of Brian” is a candidate for all-time best comedy, and its song “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life” has been recycled in the musical “Monty Python’s Spamalot” and even the recent closing Olympic ceremony. Some of the movie’s outrageous quality remains, but now we look forward to such impudence. Some of the clashing discords and once-unnerving sonorities in modernist music become pleasurable on revisiting; some of the obscurities in modernist poetry and drama become sensuous.  In 2008 the French-Algerian modern dancer Rachid Ouramdane presented “Far...”, which was largely docudrama, to Dance Theater Workshop. The testimony of torture it presented on film was dismaying, but what took me most aback was the way he then danced — not in protest or grief but gently, as if numb. The dance, in context, was about not feeling but the mind’s withdrawal from feeling: post-traumatic stress in movement. Nobody could be outraged by such dancing. But that non sequitur effect, like “Did you see Kim and the kids?,” remains a major jolt to the senses.  Julien Jourdes for The New York Times  Rachid Ouramdane performing “Far...” at Dance Theater Workshop.  BEN BRANTLEY, CHIEF THEATER CRITIC: That’s a very shrewd point, Alastair, about shock being a matter of social choice, or even social collusion, especially these days when it often feels as if it’s been removed from our conditioned reflex system, at least in response to art. There’s also the sense that often art doesn’t make a straightforward statement. I think that’s generally true of great art, but now it seems to be the modus operandi for lesser art too.  What an artist says may be only a pose, after all, and how foolish we’d look if we took him or her literally or failed to see the invisible quotation marks. At the same time, we seem to take all public figures, whether politicians or movie stars, exactly at their words. It’s as if irony isn’t allowed to exist in public discourse, whereas it’s sine qua non in much art today.  Chuck Palahniuk shot to fame in 1999 with David Fincher’s now-classic screen adaptation of his novel “Fight Club,” an incendiary exploration of violence and masculine alienation that one critic, in a not atypical sentiment, denounced as “a film without a single redeeming quality, which may have to find its audience in hell.” Since then, in novels like “Choke,” “Rant” and “Snuff,” Mr. Palahniuk has continued to explore the outer limits of human behavior, delivering shocks that have divided the critics while inspiring rabid fan devotion and more than a few public faintings. (Nearly 70 people had passed out at readings of his story “Guts,” he once boasted.)  In a recent e-mail conversation, Mr. Palahniuk, whose novel “Damned” appears in paperback next week, talked about the future of transgressive fiction, his preferred self-cure for “short-term insanity” and the written word’s unique pathways to shock.  Q. You’ve been called a literary “shock jock” by fans and detractors alike. Is shocking readers something you deliberately set out to do?  A. It’s never my intention to offend a reader or listener; I’m too addicted to external approval. When I write, one of my basic goals is to preserve and communicate the incredible stories I hear from people, true stories from real people. By finding a common theme between several anecdotes, often told to me decades apart, I can create a collage of kinetic, visually bold images that combine to illustrate a bigger truth. When I take a year to write a story, I’m doing so because I find it emotionally moving. If you were to read that story every day for a year, you’d move past any initial shock and also find the heartbreak. Culture that’s harder to accept, initially, tends to be culture that lasts longer.  Q. In the documentary “Postcards From the Future” (2003), you said that “transgressive fiction” died after Sept. 11, and that maybe it was time for social commentary in art to become “charming, seductive and entertaining.” Has transgressive fiction come back since then? Or has it become more difficult for art to be as shocking as the world itself?  A. “Transgressive fiction” has become an oxymoron. Almost all the dynamic, edgy storytellers have moved to film, and books have fallen into that twilight of pre-death where live theater limps along. The most successful books now serve us as sedatives, confirming the values and worldviews their readers already hold. They’re the books we read as sleeping pills at bedtime. When was the last book banned? Oh, how I miss the great book bonfires of my Christian youth! That’s when books had some power! When they had to be burned like witches.  Q. You have said that one of your goals in writing is to shock yourself. But how easy is it for other people to shock you?  A. To be honest, my best writing happens when I need some place to put my short-term insanity. And it’s a vast comfort when other people tell me secrets that put my suicide-watch moods into perspective. The sudden release of tension: the revelation that I’m not suffering alone, that everyone endures this, it occurs like the punch line of a joke. So much is resolved so quickly that I have to laugh or gasp. When people give me that gift I can’t wait to pay it forward and have that same wonderful effect on someone else.  Q. Several of your novels and stories have been turned into movies, and “Fight Club” has got to be on many people’s list of most shocking movie endings. Do you think it’s harder for a novel to have that kind of immediate visceral effect on the reader? Or does the written word have its own uniquely powerful paths to shock?  A. The key is to play to the strength of the medium. It’s easier to hide the ultimate truth in books and stories. It’s easier to create spectacle in films. In the novel “Fight Club” our last glimpse of the narrator is in “heaven” haggling with “God,” but the reader realizes it’s actually a mental hospital and a psychologist. Such a quiet ambiguous ending doesn’t serve an audience seated at the foot of a 100-foot-tall screen. The book tells an intimate, interior story. The film does what film does best. The two forms can coexist. David Fincher’s no dummy.  In a stand-up set on Comedy Central in July, the comic Ben Kronberg made a distinction. “A bun in the oven is cute, but a baby in the oven is horrifying,” he said. Then he went a little further. “And if you get a really young girl pregnant, it’s like a bun in the Easy-Bake Oven, because they come out all doughy and stuff.”  Both jokes got laughs, but only the second punch line received queasy gasps. (The creepy hand gesture that accompanied the word “doughy” may have had something to do with that stomach-turning reaction.) Mr. Kronberg is a sly oddball who tells well-sculptured jokes about abortion, disease and racism, but the most shocking are simply gross. Finishing this bit, he says: “I know: Eww.”  The sick jokes that cause the biggest fuss these days push moral hot buttons. (See Daniel Tosh’s rape joke.) But the more common ones, which you find everywhere from shock radio to “Bridesmaids,” appeal to the limitless appetite for eww. This comedy is often more silly than scandalous, disgusting than dark. Yet the gags can sometimes shock, their power deriving from surprise, excess and busting taboos. They overlap with an equally fertile element of the horror genre: gore. Gross-out comedy is a cousin to the splatter film.  As I learned reporting my book, “Shock Value: How a Few Eccentric Outsiders Gave Us Nightmares, Conquered Hollywood and Invented Modern Horror,” the line between horror and comedy has long been blurry. Alfred Hitchcock called “Psycho” a comedy. Tobe Hooper expected people to laugh at “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.” In a similar fashion, comedians are famously dark and obsessed with death.  The relationship between vulgar humor and repulsive horror is particularly close. It’s no accident that after helping pioneer the slasher movie with the 1974 sorority house thriller “Black Christmas,” the Canadian director Bob Clark went on to make “Porky’s,” the dirty godfather of the raunchy teenage sex comedy. While the past few decades have made these movies seem far less shocking than they once were, these commercial genres still trade on shock.  And the pacing is similar. Just look at audiences watching them. They start relaxed, then become increasingly tense as the action builds, and then after the big reveal, be it a joke or a kill, the viewers’ anxiety dissipates audibly with either a laugh or a gasp. At scary movies the first thing audiences typically do after screaming is laugh at themselves. While explicit material may turn off some, others become more alert.  So much art washes over us, or is predictable enough that it requires only partial attention. Say what you want about the image of a doughy baby, but it gets your attention. George A. Romero, the horror auteur of “Night of the Living Dead” and more, describes gore’s purpose as a “slap in the face, a wake-up call, an alarm clock.”  But the artists who are out only to ring an alarm waste an opportunity. The best ones exploit it to make the kind of artistic statement that you couldn’t get away with in a more restrained movie. There is an art to a good flatulence joke, and anyone who has seen a murder choreographed by Dario Argento or Brian De Palma knows that some assaults on good taste are in service of a refined aesthetic.  The varieties of shock in horror and comedy can seem endless. For many people the excitement of gross-outs is in the excess. If you look at the early movies of Peter Jackson or Sam Raimi, like “Dead Alive” and “The Evil Dead,” they are full of blood baths that are strikingly beautiful, yet also laughably ridiculous. Comic or scary gore can have a playfulness that aims for the gentlest of shocks. Martin McDonagh’s plays (notably “A Skull in Connemara” and “The Lieutenant of Inishmore” ) deliver tougher jolts that culminate in over-the-top scenes that manage to be both funny and menacing.  One of the most shocking comedies I’ve ever seen was “Billy the Mime,” in which Steven Banks took the most minimalist art form and injected it with gratuitous immorality. At the New York International Fringe Festival, he superbly performed a series of impossibly obscene vignettes without a word or prop. He dramatized scenes involving an altar boy and a priest, an abortion and the plotting and executing of the attacks on Sept. 11. Part of the shock here was in setting expectations. These sketches start light, silly, benign. After all, it’s mime, the cheesiest art form around, right? Then Mr. Banks skillfully ups the ante, taking audiences places they did not expect or probably want to go. Its tastelessness becomes its own pitch-black joke. And the realization that you laughed at it so heartily might be the most shocking part of the show.  How many historic nights in the theater were actually a lot less historic than history makes out? I have read numerous reviews — by critics French, American and British — of the triumphant 1990 return of the original 1913 staging of “Le Sacre du Printemps” (“The Rite of Spring”) to the site of its premiere, the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris. I attended that performance, and my own memories are not of triumph.  This Joffrey Ballet production had had its premiere in the United States in 1987, with Millicent Hodson staging her version of Vaslav Nijinsky’s choreography, and Kenneth Archer reviving the designs of Nicholas Roerich.  Now the Joffrey was bringing it back to Paris, where just then I happened to be passing through. It proved easy that morning to buy a ticket. The theater is on the Avenue Montaigne, where many of the most eminent fashion salons of Paris have their homes, and that was the evening of their autumn openings. Dior! Chanel! Saint Laurent! Lacroix! Le tout Paris, gorgeously arrayed, was on the avenue that night as I made my way to the performance.  The audience at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées was not unfashionable. My seat was toward the back of the second ring. I remember the frisson of curious anticipation around me. In what frame of mind do you watch the revival of a scandal of yesteryear?  It’s famous that the riotous reaction to Stravinsky’s music on the first night in 1913 occurred immediately and continuously. In 1990, however, the audience around me was politely bored. A delectably well-dressed couple sat in the center of the front row, trying hard but unsuccessfully to be thrilled; I can never forget the look of their physical deflation as their heads and spines sagged. After 10 or 15 minutes they rested their elegant heads sideways on the balcony’s edge, as if the choreography were a lullaby.  They were, nonetheless, good sports. As soon as the music stopped, and a curtain descended, they burst into eager applause, leapt to their feet and cried, “Bravo, bravo!” — while starting to beat a brisk retreat to the exit. Then it suddenly dawned on them that this was the end not of the ballet but merely of its first part. Their faces fell, though they did not stop applauding. After a quick, anxious consultation, they decided that departure was the best policy; they were not alone.  Those who stayed greeted the end of the ballet’s second half in much the same spirit. There were many cries of “Bravo,” but they came from people who had never once looked electrified by the dancing onstage. The great events in Parisian culture that night were happening elsewhere — on the very same avenue.  Alastair Macaulay is the chief dance critic for The Times.  When asked to name a piece of classical music that shocked me, I was surprised at how hard it was to come up with something, especially a recent piece. Maybe that’s because music is the least explicit of the arts: it moves us powerfully but unspecifically. Unless, of course, there are words attached, as with songs, or a theatrical experience, as in opera.  I have been more easily shocked by works from other art forms, like gangsta rap that indulges in ranting homophobia and misogyny. I remember being deeply disturbed to see Alex, the sociopath delinquent at the center of Stanley Kubrick’s film version of “A Clockwork Orange,” carrying out acts of sadistic violence while relishing Moog synthesizer versions of classical works like Beethoven’s Ninth. Maybe I overreacted. But I have not seen that 1971 film since it was new.  To be shocked by art, do you have to be so stunned that your ability to sort out your thoughts and feelings breaks down? At the 1913 premiere of “The Rite of Spring” in Paris, people in the audience who found the ballet shocking channeled their feelings into indignation and ridicule.  So, for an example of shocking classical music — and this may not be the most original choice — there is the final scene of Strauss’s “Salome.” Here the perversely seductive young princess Salome, unable to get a rise out of the sanctimonious Jochanaan (John the Baptist), demands his head on a silver platter as a reward for entertaining Herod with an erotic dance. In an unhinged display of necrophilia, Salome fondles the severed head and kisses its lips.  Strauss makes the moment shocking by writing insidiously alluring music, blatantly trying to pull listeners into Salome’s twisted desires. Herod watches her, then, shocked beyond belief, orders his soldiers to crush Salome with their shields, which is accomplished in just a few moments of slashing, violent music.  This scene and the opera are very familiar. But in a gripping performance and courageous production, the ending of “Salome” is still shocking.  Anthony Tommasini is chief classical music critic for The Times.  It's only been a few hours since The New York Post reported that “Piss Christ,” the infamous photograph by Andres Serrano showing a crucifix submerged in urine, will go on view in New York next week, and already some critics are trying to stage a rerun of 1989.  Back then, Senator Alfonse D’Amato, Republican of New York, denounced the photograph on the floor of the Senate as “a deplorable, despicable piece of vulgarity” before ripping up a reproduction and throwing the pieces on the ground. This time around, the Catholic League has announced plans to picket the exhibit, while a Republican congressman has charged President Obama with “religious hypocrisy” for failing to speak out against the exhibit even as he denounces the anti-Islam video that has sparked deadly riots across the Muslim world.  Senator D’Amato’s denunciation occurred during a debate over federal financing for “offensive” art, which largely ended in 1994, when the National Endowment for the Arts stopped giving grants to individual artists. But since then Mr. Serrano’s most famous work (part of a series showing various religious icons soaked with blood, milk and other bodily fluids) has continued to attract physical assaults.  The work has been attacked by vandals in Australia and Sweden. And last year a hammer-wielding lay critic in France permanently damaged one of the 10 existing prints, perhaps in ways that only deepened its commentary on bodily suffering. (“It looked like they’d attacked Christ,” Mr. Serrano told The Post. “The marks were all around the face.” )  Edward Tyler Nahem Fine Art, which will be showing an undamaged print as part of a Serrano retrospective, said it was increasing security for the exhibition, which runs through Oct. 26. But it’s been a while since works deemed blasphemous have inspired loud public protest in New York. In 2010 the National Portrait Gallery in Washington removed a 1987 video by David Wojnarowicz, another veteran of the N.E.A. battles, from an exhibition after politicians in Congress complained about a brief sequence showing ants crawling on a crucifix. But there was little public fuss when the video was included in a version of the same show at the Brooklyn Museum the following year.  In his 1999 book, “American Visions,” the critic Robert Hughes called the controversy over “Piss Christ” an example of right-wing Christians co-opting the language of identity politics pioneered by the left. (If only Mr. Serrano had given his “technically splendid” photograph another name, Mr. Hughes noted elsewhere, the whole incident would have been avoided.) Readers, what do you think? Can works like “Piss Christ” still cause genuine shock? Or do we need politicians and advocacy groups to fan the flames?  Over the next week, four New York Times critics — Roberta Smith, Ben Brantley, A. O. Scott and Alastair Macaulay— will chat about the role of shock in art: how it works, how it has changed and why it’s still necessary. Jennifer Schuessler moderates.  JENNIFER SCHUESSLER, REPORTER: Roberta, I wonder if there’s more to say about what Alastair calls “shocks of feeling — of trying to connect and comprehend” — and how that feels to you. As accustomed as we might get to certain formerly taboo content, and certain experimental gestures, it seems as if art’s ability to deeply confuse us in ways that feel like shock never really goes away.  ROBERTA SMITH, CO-CHIEF ART CRITIC: I love Alastair’s much more nuanced, example-rich expansion of a point I barely grazed earlier: that shock is an intrinsic part of aesthetic experience, that it exists on a kind of continuum with pleasure, revelation and surprise — “the tingle factor” — and that it is part of what is sustaining about art of all kinds from all times and places. The fact that older art exists, has been preserved and passed along, and most of all continues to speak to us, is in itself something of a shock, whether or not the content of the work — as in Ben’s mention of Euripides — is inherently shocking. The shock of connection to the past, the sense that people from past millenniums weren’t that different from us, ups “the tingle factor.” I definitely felt this in the exhibition of predynastic Egyptian art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art last spring, in both small figures and a series of ceramic vessels decorated with animal and landscape scenes that all had an informality and antic energy unlike almost anything from dynastic Egypt.  At the same time, I wonder if shock as we’re discussing it here is something of a modern construct, part of our idea of progress. In modern times I think artists deliberately pursue shock, even when they deny it, to the extent that they try not to repeat the work of their predecessors. Jasper Johns, whose flags and targets caused some of the biggest shock waves in visual arts in mid-20th-century America, denied trying to overturn the Abstract Expressionists. He respected them tremendously, but he wanted to make work that didn’t remind him of anyone else, and also — as he so poignantly put it — that he could not avoid making.  A Jasper Johns flag painting.  BEN BRANTLEY, CHIEF THEATER CRITIC: I figured we’d wind up in semantics eventually.  If by shock, we mean what Proust called surprise — something that so jolts our habit-encrusted perceptions that we see things with a startling new vividness — then, yes, shock is an essential component of all great art. But of course “shock” — particularly, as Roberta puts it, as a modern construct — implies a violence of attack and response that I don’t necessarily associate with all great art.  Chekhov, for me, is the greatest of all playwrights after Shakespeare. And yet I wouldn’t say I’m shocked by his singularly comic dramas when I see them performed now. What I am is surprised — wonderfully, thrillingly surprised — by how fresh he always feels and by how much I see, in every new production of Chekhov (even mediocre ones), that I hadn’t seen before.  Sara Krulwich/The New York Times  Cate Blanchett and Richard Roxburgh in the Sydney Theater Company’s production of “Uncle Vanya,”.  “Uncle Vanya” is in its way as ruthless and devastating as “King Lear.” But you don’t feel you’ve had the wind knocked out of you after seeing “Vanya,” as you do at the end of “Lear.” Maybe a little suicidal, sure, but that’s a penalty of succumbing to the clarity of great art; it’s in the same package as that dizzy exhilaration you feel as well.  That said, I think theater is especially well equipped to let contemporary audiences rediscover what’s enduringly shocking/surprising/awakening in classical works. Few “shocks” are as satisfying or unexpected as those that come with revisiting a canonical play and feeling that you’re seeing it for the first time. I had that experience early in my tenure as a Times critic with Anthony Page’s 1997 production of Ibsen’s “Doll’s House,” starring Janet McTeer as Nora.  Of course I knew — had known since I was a kid — that “A Doll’s House” was a bona fide, five-alarm shocker in its day, what with a once dutiful wife slamming the door on her marriage (and her children!). But until I saw Ms. McTeer’s interpretation, I hadn’t felt the overwhelming sadness that accompanies Nora’s self-awareness. At the end she’s mourning a love that wasn’t and a life that cannot be, and I bawled (mortifyingly) every one of the three times I saw the show. Nora’s new clarity, like the clarity that Ibsen gives us, has its own tragic inevitability.  For the record, I had a similar response — both a ping of illumination and a pang of fathoms-deep hurt — both times I saw Tamas Ascher’s Sydney Theater Company production of “Uncle Vanya,” which came to New York in July as part of the Lincoln Center Festival. I even felt that way when I saw the Shakespeare’s Globe production of “Twelfth Night,” a comedy, starring Mark Rylance as Olivia. I thought, “So, that’s what it’s all about.” Or, rather, I should say I felt that sentiment in my gut, not thought it. Shock, if we’re still using that word, is visceral.  There’s a terrific moment in Jeanette Winterson’s recent memoir,“Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?,” when her mother tries to stop her from reading so voraciously as a teenager. “The trouble with books,” the mother cautions, “is that you never know what’s in them until it’s too late.” Her fear was that her daughter would stumble upon things that would derange her. (Luckily for us, she did.)  When I was roughly the same age, perhaps a bit older, I set out to read the great “obscene” classics. I wanted a bit of a shock, as all teenagers in their way do. I wanted the sound of broken glass — or at least the sound of mad intellects and hysterical rutting. It seemed as good a way to compile a reading list as any. Works as disparate as “Fanny Hill,” “Howl,” “Lolita,” “Lady Chatterley’s Lover,” “The Story of O,” “Tropic of Cancer,” “Candide,” “Candy” and “Journey to the End of the Night,” not to mention “Fear of Flying,” “Blue Skies, No Candy” and “The Basketball Diaries” fell to the blade of my reading.  Was I shocked? Not often, not really. I’d read enough contemporary novels that had, in terms on mundane nonliterary shock value, surpassed them. The only book on my improvised list that shook me to the core was Nabokov’s “Lolita,” simply because I didn’t know it was possible to write so keenly and ebulliently. The sound his prose made is one I would seek out my entire life. I was shocked, too, I should add, when my high school English teacher walked to the front of the classroom and said this: Nearly every Emily Dickinson poem can be sung to “The Yellow Rose of Texas.” Talk about derangement.  Dwight Garner is a book critic for The Times.  Stand-up comedy is full of small shocks, but you never forget your first. George Carlin was playing an unglamorous gig in a gym in Ithaca, N.Y., in the early 1990s. He walked onstage with a purposeful stride and broke immediately into a bit about abortion. Few, if any, issues at the time were more polarizing.  Carlin’s most famous abortion joke was probably the one where he asked if you ever noticed how pro-life women never look like the ones you want to sleep with. But the joke that startled this audience was designed to provoke both sides. It was over two decades ago, so my memory of the wording may be slightly off, but I recall well the way he set it up.  “Pro-lifers believe the fetus is a baby, so that’s why we shouldn’t kill it, while pro-choicers believe the fetus is not a baby, which is why women should be able to choose.” Mr. Carlin paused, before laying his cards on the table. “I believe the fetus is a baby— and we should kill it.”  After a cacophony of gasps and laughs, a handful of people in the front rows walked out. As a naïve teenager at my first stand-up show, I recall wondering if it would have been smarter to end with that joke. But leading with it was surely part of his point. As Carlin once put it: “It’s the duty of the comedian to find out where the line is drawn and cross it deliberately.”  Jason Zinoman writes the comedy column for The Times.  Hiroyuki Ito for The New York Times  Alan Gilbert and the New York Philharmonic on Wednesday night.  A shattering wave of civility broke out at Avery Fisher Hall on Wednesday evening. Rioters stayed silent and in their seats. Angry claques remained incognito. Igor Stravinsky did not escape backstage.  The New York Philharmonic led off the season’s widespread commemoration of the 100th anniversary of the premiere of Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring,” a work that has come to symbolize violent audience reaction. Contemporary and later accounts of that evening, on May 29, 1913, at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris, differ widely in the details, but one thing is clear: the audience made a lot of noise during the performance of the music and the accompanying dance.  Wednesday evening’s performance, conducted by the Philharmonic’s music director, Alan Gilbert, was a stark example of how much “The Rite” has become a staple of the concert hall and how much its primitivist rhythms and harmonies are fixed in our ears through numerous recordings. The audience, strongly attentive, broke out in full voice only at the end. There were cheers, not boos.  One bit of evidence of the work’s shocking nature came in a center orchestra row. Four or five gentlemen there appeared to be dozing (or at least had their eyes closed) during a performance of Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 3. During “The Rite,” they kept their lids open.  There was one tiny moment of crowd shenanigans during the concert. An audience member let out a slight whoop at the end of the first movement of the Beethoven concerto, in appreciation of Leif Ove Andsnes’s performance, unleashing between-movement applause, which is not typical concert etiquette.  The audience member was not removed from the hall.  Read Anthony Tommasini's review »  In the critics’ forum that began on Wednesday, critics for The New York Times named some works of art that shocked them, including the confusing cacophony of John Cage’s music for the Merce Cunningham Dance Company and the “brilliant existential slap in the face” that wrapped up “The Sopranos.” That conversation continues over the next week. And starting later on Thursday, other Times critics will weigh in with reminiscences of their own shocking moments.  Watch Merce Cunningham's on PBS. See more from MetroFocus.  Meanwhile, readers have been sharing their own memories in the comments section, sometimes with descriptions of works that would meet just about anyone’s definition of shock. Davidson Gigliotti recalled participating in Tosun Bayrak’s 1970 performance piece “Love America or Live,” during which a huge piece of brown butcher’s paper covering part of Prince Street in Soho was pulled back to reveal “piles of offal from a slaughterhouse, a copulating couple and other quite unsavory items.” The piece, which also included a naked boy covered in animal organs and the release of a sack of white rats, ended with a video collective dumping large containers of blood from the roof of 98 Prince Street onto a dancer below. (Ah, New York in the ’70s!)  But shock isn’t just about blood and guts. Josh Hill of New London cited the impact of “Don Giovanni,” while another commenter mentioned an elegy by the ancient Greek poet Archilochus, in which he claimed to have tossed aside his shield and fled from battle — “an admission of unmanly cowardice” that would have been “unthinkable in Greek lyric poetry up to that point.”  We’ll let the classicists hash that one out. But readers, do you have any other specific memories of shocking art encounters to share? Rats and Mozart optional.  Over the next week, four New York Times critics — Roberta Smith, Ben Brantley, A. O. Scott and Alastair Macaulay— will chat about the role of shock in art: how it works, how it has changed and why it’s still necessary. Jennifer Schuessler moderates.  JENNIFER SCHUESSLER: Tony, I’d be curious to hear, among other things, if you think there’s any equivalent to the “guaranteed shock-maker” that Ben sees in the theater these days — the violation of the premise that no matter how horrible the events onstage, the audience will be let off the hook at the end with some kind of redemption. Hollywood happy endings notwithstanding, are movie audiences (or at least some of them) less in need of that kind of reassurance?  Also, in light of what Ben says about “Blasted” and “Mercury Fur,” I’d be curious for your thoughts about the different thresholds for shock at the movies and in live theater.  A. O. SCOTT: CO-CHIEF MOVIE CRITIC: For much of their history, moving pictures — both in theaters and in the home — have been heavily regulated, partly in recognition of their inherent power to shock and disturb. The origin myth of cinema is an allegory of this power: the first movie audience, watching the Lumière brothers’ film of a train arriving at La Ciotat station, supposedly fled the theater in a panic. And the literalness of the filmed image continued to be a source of scandal in the 1930s, when the Hays Office promulgated a code that severely limited depictions of sex, violence and immorality.  Those days are long gone, but there are still taboos and still, as Ben and Roberta note, the possibility of shock. I think Ben’s point about theater applies, with some modification, to movies and television. Audiences are no longer likely to be upset by nudity, sexuality or bloodshed, or alienated by formal experimentation. The tactics of chronological displacement, disruptive editing and fourth-wall breaking that were hallmarks of the avant-garde in the 1960s have long since been made safe for the multiplex. What can still cause discomfort — or that welcome sense of being challenged, confronted, nudged out of your complacency — is an attitude or a tone that defies our sense of how certain thematic material should be handled.  We routinely absorb, and indeed enjoy, displays of savagery or sensuality that would have appalled our grandparents, but the implicit contract that Ben mentions is very much in force. We want closure, catharsis, some kind of assurance that what we have seen has meaning and takes place within a morally ordered imaginative universe. This does not necessarily mean a happy ending, but one that is, to echo Ben and a thousand movie press releases, “redemptive.”  The defiance of this redemptive imperative is, in film, something of a European specialty. At some film festivals, the grim, nihilistic ending can seem as much of a cliché as the lump-in-the-throat, things-will-be-okay ending is at Sundance. And it’s an interesting question whether audiences in France, Germany or Denmark are quite as likely to be shocked by Lars von Trier, Michael Haneke or their fellow provocateurs.  Mr. von Trier’s most recent film, “Melancholia,” was less abrasive than some of his other work — not as cheaply provocative as “The Idiots” or as hostile as “Dogville” — but it was rigorous and extreme in refusing redemption. Hollywood has been in love with disaster for a long time, but American movie apocalypses have usually held to the codicil spelled out in the theme song from “The Poseidon Adventure”: there’s got to be a morning after.  From left, Kirsten Dunst, Alexander Skarsgaard, Kiefer Sutherland and Charlotte Gainsbourg in “Melancholia.”  In “Melancholia,” a rogue planet is heading for Earth, threatening to extinguish all life, and then — spoiler alert! — it does. This is not necessarily surprising, but it is dismaying and disconcerting in a way that deserves the weary name of shock.  Another recent piece of visual narrative that might qualify is the end of “The Sopranos,” that sudden blackout that ignited much furor on the Internet a few years ago. An audience primed for a grand conclusion, or at least a proper goodbye, instead got a brilliant existential slap in the face.  Shocks occur when we’re taken out of our comfort zone. I agree with all that’s been said about shocks in new and recent art — but they don’t come from new art alone. Do we — should we — ever get over the many shocks in “King Lear”? The blinding of Gloucester is simply the play’s most famously unbearable depiction of man’s inhumanity to man. There are other ways in which “Lear” and other Shakespeare plays touch on areas so strange and dark that we can never relax with them — can never fully comprehend them.  ALASTAIR MACAULAY, CHIEF DANCE CRITIC: Like Ben, I’ve witnessed plenty of the in-yer-face theater and docudramas of recent decades. In both dance and theater, I’ve observed many versions of nakedness, and many presentations of diverse sexual practices. And some of my reactions have certainly included elements of shock.  Andrea Mohin/The New York Times  Benjamin Asriel, left, and Burr Johnson in “Fort Blossom revisited” by the choreographer John Jasperse.  Yet I find it remarkable that some of the toughest challenges came from watching the Merce Cunningham Dance Company — and listening to its music. The often cacophonous scores by John Cage and other composers went on taking me aback over the decades (machine gunfire, the snores and sighs of an old man asleep, screeches and drills abrasive in the extreme). So did the feats of human coordination, balance and rhythm in the dancing. Talk about being taken out of my comfort zone!  These weren’t shocks to do with standards of moral behavior. They were, however, shocks of feeling, of trying to connect and comprehend. How did this noise and this dancing share the same stage world? To answer that question took imagination and tolerance, and it was seldom simple. You’d think that once you’d been through one such ordeal, you were equipped to weather them all; but that’s not how it proved.  For Diaghilev, shock was good for business. Most of the frissons he gave his audience were sexual. Vaslav Nijinsky, with whom he had a remarkably open homosexual relationship, amazed pre-1914 Europe with the images he embodied in a series of roles: carnal lust in “Schéhérazade,” the androgynous distillation of romantic desire in “Le Spectre de la Rose,” and — the year before the premiere of “Le Sacre” in 1913 — the fetishistic protagonist of “L’Après-midi d’un faune,” satisfying himself with a nymph’s scarf.  Stravinsky later recalled that, on the very evening after the premiere of “Le Sacre,” Diaghilev said “Just what I wanted.” Soon he gave Jean Cocteau the formula: “Étonne-moi, Jean” — “Astonish me, Jean.”  Astonishment, shock, frisson, revelation: aren’t these different effects of art upon our senses all intimately connected? The overlap between morality and aesthetics is endlessly complex. There are tiny shocks in Mozart, even now; and the thrill we get from Fred Astaire dancing an explosive solo has its shocks too. It’s what some people have called in art “the tingle factor”; and the tingle and the shock are closely related.  Over the next week, four New York Times critics — Roberta Smith, Ben Brantley, A. O. Scott and Alastair Macaulay— will chat about the role of shock in art: how it works, how it has changed and why it’s still necessary. Jennifer Schuessler moderates.  JENNIFER SCHUESSLER, REPORTER: To kick things off, I’d just like to ask the big, broad question: Can art still shock? (And, perhaps more important, does it still need to?) I recently came across a 1913 editorial in The Times denouncing the first International Exhibition of Modern Art at the Armory in New York, held a few months before the “Rite of Spring” premiere, as “part of the general movement discernible all over the world, to disrupt and degrade, if not to destroy not only art, but literature and society too.” It’s hard to imagine any serious critic saying something like that today (if all too easy to imagine certain editorialists saying it). But have you ever found yourself having a version of that reaction to a particular work? Can art still shock you, whether for good or for ill?  ROBERTA SMITH, CO-CHIEF ART CRITIC: Can art still shock? Of course. It can, it must and it inevitably will in ways both large and small, interesting and not, lasting and fleeting. First of all we have to remember that shock, like beauty, is very much in the mind and eye of the beholder. All sorts of people can be shocked by all sorts of things, for all sorts of reasons, many of them unexamined. Works of art continue to be removed from exhibitions around the world because they offend the tender sensibilities of people who pay art almost no attention otherwise and haven’t a clue that one of its roles is to provoke new thought. Usually they object to artworks they have not themselves personally experienced, as happened when Chris Ofili’s visually opulent, mildly transgressive “Holy Virgin Mary,” with its small, thickly shellacked and beaded balls of elephant dung, was exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum in 1999 as part of the exhibition “Sensation: Young British Artists from the Saatchi Collection.” It became the object of vilification, a tempest in a teapot assiduously agitated by the Catholic League, Mayor Giuliani and others who never laid eyes on it.  “The Holy Virgin Mary” by Chris Ofili at the Brooklyn Museum.  Secondly, we might remember that people who care about the arts and follow them are to some extent looking for experiences different from ones they have had before, and that genuinely ambitious artists strive not to repeat history. Part of what draws us back again and again to great art — Wagner’s “Ring,” Emily Dickenson’s poetry, Malevich’s paintings — is the thrill of their intrinsic radicality and refusal to repeat, their shockingness. Of course, there is newness for the sake of newness, shock for shock’s sake, and that’s where the critical faculty — which anyone interested in the arts possesses and cultivates — comes in. Professional critics in particular are by definition excellent shock-absorbers. We welcome shock and the chance to work through it, to see if it survives scrutiny and might therefore be a sign of some kind of expansion of a given art form or if it is just obvious calculation. At this point I’m working my way through the shock of Gerhard Richter’s large new “Strip” paintings at the Marian Goodman Gallery on West 57th Street, whose digitally achieved horizontal stripes, printed on paper and mounted behind clear shiny plastic, are still wavering in my mind between art and very fancy Formica.  BEN BRANTLEY, CHIEF THEATER CRITIC: As Roberta says, shock depends on its audience and what that audience is already familiar with. A moving picture screened to a people who had never encountered one (if such people exist) would surely shock and alarm them. But I presume we’re mostly positing an audience that has access to television and to the Internet, where pretty much any image, and groupings of words and musical notes, are available if not unavoidable. And then there are, as Roberta also suggests, those worldly souls who are connoisseurs of shock, hungry for the jolt of the truly new. I suppose any fulltime critic of the arts belongs (or should belong) to that category.  To most of us today, critics or not, the traditional shock stimuli of form and content aren’t likely to rattle us unduly. That means nudity, obscenity, violence and degrees of abstraction and willful incoherence may offend or muddle people, but probably not shock them. They know what’s out there and has been out there for years.  But yes, shock happens, still, and it’s usually a good thing, in that it forces us to rearrange our thoughts and reconsider conditioned responses. At its best and rarest, this occurs when you realize that an artist is speaking in a new language that is uniquely his or hers. (I felt that the first time I saw a play by Richard Maxwell, the master of affectless drama.) In such cases, your first response is “You’re putting me on”; then, “No, you’re serious”; then, with wonderment, “Hey, you’re, uh, the real thing.”  But there’s one other guaranteed shock-maker in the theater these days. That’s what happens when a particular, implicit covenant between theatermakers and theatergoers — one that exists even to this day — is violated. I mean the promise that no matter what’s presented onstage, you’ll be let off the hook at the end with some sort of reassurance or release, a sense of redemption or catharsis. When that release is denied — at least when it’s denied by artists in full control of their powers — audiences inevitably get angry.  Josh Haner/The New York Times  Sarah Benson directed “Blasted,” in 2008 at Soho Rep.  What was and is so shocking about “Blasted,” Sarah Kane’s 1995 study of human inhumanity, isn’t the cannibalism or the rape or the mutilation, or even the literal explosion at the end. (That’s a coup de théâtre, which is a different kind of jolt than a real, psyche-rumbling shock.) It’s the unstated premise that people like you and me are naturally exploitative beings, capable — when pushed far enough — of behavior similar to the Balkan war atrocities that inspired Kane’s play.  Kane (who killed herself in 1999) never allowed her audience any distance from her genuinely bleak worldview, because she herself believed in it so unconditionally. (Her later “4:48 Psychosis” is essentially a suicide note that brooks no argument or contradiction.)  I felt a similar depth-charge chill when I saw Philip Ridley’s “Mercury Fur” in London in June, a play that depicts a ravaged, homicidal dystopian future that at first seems much like our own anxious present. I saw people leaving the tiny theater toward the play’s end, and I understood why.  This kind of shock, which is also practiced by (relatively) old masters like Edward Albee and Wallace Shawn, is as ancient as theater itself, though when it occurs in a long-ago classic (like something by Euripides) we feel safely distanced by time and our cultural differences. But the right revival of one of those works (and they’re rare, too) can still generate enough shock waves to paralyze a house.  Check back soon for more of the conversation.  Schoenberg's Three Piano Pieces (Op. 11), written in 1909, took music into an almost freely atonal realm. They were not intended to shock, but their harmonic language is utterly radical.  As Debussy’s “Jeux” suggests, a work of art can be radical without being shocking. This is true in all the arts. Seurat’s technique of dots was radical, but his paintings are joyous and dazzling. In its language and ambiguity, Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot” represents radical theater, but a good performance of this profound play should have the audience laughing, and comic actors have been its best interpreters.  “Jeux” was not created to shock. The “Rite” was, and did the trick. But the shock value of the “Rite” comes more from the savagery, pummeling power and grating dissonance of the score than from any pathbreaking experiments with radical composition on Stravinsky’s part.  That a piece is shocking or radical does not in itself make it good. Composers can easily be gratuitously shocking or self-consciously radical. Moreover, a backward-seeming artistic departure can actually be a radical development. In the 1960s, when contemporary music seemed to be dominated by intensely complex serialist composers, the arrival of the exuberant Minimalists struck many as a radical shift.  Stravinsky’s “Rite” is not just shocking but also ingenious, audacious and original. Yet other important composers of that era were writing music that was more radical.  Radicalism in music has most often been attributed to works that push the boundaries of harmonic language. Of course, music can be radical in other ways: rhythm, structure, texture, the use of instruments. But harmonic innovations, being the most audible, have received the most attention and provoked the most backlash.  Read the full article »  Sara Krulwich/The New York Times  "A Fire in My Belly," a 1988 video work by David Wojnarowicz,  at the New Museum in New York.  Many of those commenting on my article on shock in art yesterday have focused on what was missing. Why no nod to the late Robert Hughes, the art critic who coined the phrase “the shock of the new”? What about Pussy Riot, the performance artists who were recently sentenced to jail for performing a profane punk song in Moscow’s main cathedral? And why no mention of “Innocence of Muslims,” the anti-Islam video that went viral last week, touching off violent riots across the Muslim world?  As Artfan put it succinctly, “Who needs art to shock us when every day the headlines do their job just fine?”  The crudely made “Innocence of Muslims” video, which surfaced after the article went to press, hardly qualifies as art. But allegations of blasphemy have long been a trigger for art controversies in the United States, even if violent riots have been few and far between.  Martin Scorsese’s 1988 film, “The Last Temptation of Christ,” brought out demonstrators across the country. In 1989 Andres Serrano’s “Piss Christ,” a photograph showing a crucifix submerged in his own urine, prompted a Congressional effort to cut financing for the National Endowment for the Arts. In 1997 Manhattan Theater Club canceled Terrence McNally’s play “Corpus Christi,” featuring a gay, Christ-like figure and 12 gay apostles, after it drew anonymous bomb threats. (The theater later reversed itself.)  More recently, in 2010, the National Portrait Gallery in Washington removed “A Fire in My Belly,” a 1988 video by the artist David Wojnarowicz, after complaints that the video, which included a few seconds of footage showing ants crawling on a crucifix, was deliberately offensive to Christians.  “It would jump out at people if they had ants crawling all over the body of Muhammad,” Bill Donohue, the president of the Catholic League, told The New York Times. “Except they wouldn’t do it, of course, for obvious reasons.”  In most of those cases, critics and curators defended those pieces as genuine efforts to wrestle with issues of faith, suffering and death, rather than simply efforts to provoke. As Mr. Wojnarowicz, who died of AIDS in 1992, once said of another work of his that also incorporated an image of the crucified Jesus, “I wanted to make a symbol that would show that he would take on the suffering of the vast amounts of addiction I saw on the streets. And I did this because I saw very little treatment available for people who had this illness.”  But to some — including some making comments in this forum — secular, liberal audiences are no less quick to take offense when they think their own values are traduced. “For art to shock today it would have to go against the anything-goes secular liberalism of today,” writes one, BN, “but if it did it would be immediately shouted down and removed by those same forces.”  That is surely an overstatement: when was the last time a work of art was removed from a gallery or museum in response to pressure from atheists? But there is certainly some work out there that pushes against the secularism of art-savvy audiences in ways that make them uncomfortable.  Vallejo Gantner, the artistic director of Performance Space 122, a fixture of the Manhattan avant-garde, recalled some consternation in the audience at a performance of “Church,” a 2007 piece by the experimental playwright Young Jean Lee, which gave a more sympathetic portrayal of evangelical Christians than some of the hardened downtown audience may have been prepared for.  The play began with a character excoriating the audience for its like-minded complacency — “You are all incredibly similar to the people sitting around you right now. The vast majority of them are doomed to a life of disappointing mediocrity, just like yours” — and moved toward a wink-free chorus of ecstatic singing that left at least one audience member (according to Jason Zinoman’s review in The Times) saying, “That really freaked me out!”  Mr. Gantner, for his part, took the show as depicting “a sincere attempt to believe in God,” adding, “At a certain point, to a downtown audience, that was far more shocking than saying God doesn’t exist.”  Readers, are there any plays, movies, paintings or any other works of art that have shaken your own view of the world, for good or for ill?  Nearly a century ago the premiere of “The Rite of Spring” set off an audience riot that brought in the Paris police and prompted a storm of press coverage around the world, including a report in The New York Times proclaiming the evening a “failure.” But in the 100 years since, many artists have concluded that failure was actually success. The message they took from that mythical evening was that shocking the world out of its complacency is part of the duty of the modern artist, that anyone who makes audiences shout from the seats must be doing something right.  The intervening century of stylistic revolutions and taboo-busting provocations now provokes its own question: Can art still genuinely shock? And, perhaps as important, does it need to? I explored that question in Sunday’s Arts & Leisure section, and over the next two weeks critics, reporters and artists will be picking up the conversation, examining the role of shock in art across all disciplines, from classical music and theater to comedy and horror movies. They’ll also be sharing their own memories of works that shocked them — and sometimes shocks them still.  Please join the discussion. Share your observations and experiences of the intersection of outrage and artistic expression in the section on the right-hand side of this page. And please cast a vote in our admittedly whimsical poll of the most shocking artistic events of the past 100 years. See if you’re shocked by the result.  Clockwise from left, Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris — Succession Marcel Duchamp, Philadelphia Museum of Art; Agence France-Presse; Lawrence Irvine/Fine Line Features; Kino International.  Clockwise from left, Duchamp’s “Nude Descending a Staircase (No. 2)," still from "A Clockwork Orange," Divine in the John Waters film “Pink Flamingos,” Buñuel and Dalí's 1928 short film "Un Chien Andalou" and the cover from Ice-T's metal album "Body Count."  Today shock can seem indistinguishable from scandal, less a side effect of artistic innovation than a ploy ginned up by self-promoting artists and public scolds. But many artists say that generating shock remains the duty of anyone who aims to reflect the real world back at itself. Audiences may be more sophisticated, and jaded, but it is still possible to show them something they may not want to see. “Conditions in society are shocking, and art really does become a mirror to society in that way,” said the performance artist Karen Finley, who became a national symbol for shock art during the early 1990s battles over public funds for controversial art. And sometimes that mirror turns into a magnifying glass. The furor over her politically charged work — which included smearing her body with chocolate and stuffing orifices with yams, to illustrate society’s degradation of women — had less to do with the work itself, she said, than the culture warriors who seized on it to advance their own agenda.  “You can’t just say, ‘I’m going to go out and try to shock people,’ ” she said. “It’s usually a much more subtle matter of time and place.”...  Read the full article »  A drawing by Jean Cocteau of Igor Stravinsky performing his music.  “The Rite of Spring,” or “Le Sacre du Printemps,” Igor Stravinsky’s historic shocker, a ballet that shows and celebrates a remorseless human sacrifice, will be 100 years old next May. The bandwagon of centennial commemorations is getting an early start on Thursday with the New York Philharmonic. But in stark contrast to its present-day lionization, it was a spectacular flop at its first showing, by Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris.  It was Stravinsky’s third ballet for Diaghilev’s company. The earlier ones, “Firebird” and “Petrouchka,” were historic triumphs. What made the opening night of “The Rite” historic was the audience’s phenomenally bad behavior. “A real Paris scandal!” one Russian correspondent marveled. Stravinsky gamely reported to his friends, “Things got as far as fighting.”  But it was not Stravinsky’s music that did the shocking. It was the ugly earthbound lurching and stomping devised by Vaslav Nijinsky, the greatest dancer in the troupe but a novice choreographer, that offended the Paris public, for whom ballet was all about swans and tutus and elevation. Once the whistlers and hooters got going, nobody even heard the music. Most of the reviews paid no attention to Stravinsky beyond naming him as the composer before turning with gusto to the weird antics onstage and the weirder ones in the hall...  Read the full article »
Does art retain the power to shock? Must artists contrive to provoke? Join the discussion with artists, critics, reporters and readers.