Aestheticization of violence

The aestheticization of violence in high culture art or mass media has been the subject of considerable controversy and debate for centuries. In Western art, graphic depictions of the Passion of Christ have long been portrayed, as have a wide range of depictions of warfare by later painters and graphic artists. Theater and, in modern times, cinema have often featured battles and violent crimes, while images and descriptions of violence have always been a part of literature. Margaret Bruder states that the aestheticization of violence in film is the depiction of violence in a "stylistically excessive", "significant and sustained way" in which audience members are able to connect references from the "play of images and signs" to artworks, genre conventions, cultural symbols, or concepts.

High culture forms such as fine art and literature have aestheticized violence into a form of autonomous art. In 1991, University of Georgia literature professor Joel Black stated that "(if) any human act evokes the aesthetic experience of the sublime, certainly it is the act of murder". Black notes that "...if murder can be experienced aesthetically, the murderer can in turn be regarded as a kind of artist—a performance artist or anti-artist whose specialty is not creation but destruction" (1991: 14). This conception of an aesthetic element of murder has a long history; in the 19th century, Thomas de Quincey wrote that

"Everything in this world has two handles. Murder, for instance, may be laid hold of by its moral handle... and that, I confess, is its weak side; or it may also be treated aesthetically, as the Germans call it—that is, in relation to good taste."

In addition to high culture aestheticizations of violence, mass media forms such as newspaper and television news reporting have produced sensationalized reports on crime and warfare. Maria Tatar's book Lustmord: Sexual Murder in Weimar Germany analyzes murders in pre-Hitler Germany and their artistic representations, investigating "the chilling motives behind representations that aestheticize violence, and that turn the mutilated female body into an object of fascination".

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