| Abstrakt: |
The relationship of art and crime can be characterised in three aspects: a legal crime, including an ethical crime committed against or with the work of art, a situation when artists have deviant behaviour and they use or do not use their personal experience to create works of art, and crime as a theme for works of art from antiquity until the 21st century, emphasising religion, history and personal experience as the main motifs for the interpretation of the theme. This aspect is the main focus of the article. To characterise crime and deviance, we may adopt two different perspectives. First of all, sociologists treat deviance as behaviour that diverges from social heritage that is considered to be a violation of laws and norms. The criteria for deviance have changed during the course of history. The aspect of culture anthropology is to examine the functions of crime and deviance in the space of visual art. Mircea Eliade argues that the reasons for conflicts and wars most frequently have ritual reasons and functions. The beginnings of art are also connected with ritual: secular art is rooted in sacral art. The article focuses on characterisation of crime and deviance as the theme of an art work in the narrative of the article. As the theme is unfathomably vast, the author does not claim to have a meticulous account, or to provide a full overview of all periods of art, authors and their art work. The offered examples mainly serve as illustrations of ideas. Until the middle of the 19th century crime and deviance charmed the audience via historicity and distance in literature and in the works of other artists. More broadly, the depiction of crime rather imitated ritual functions. Deviance and crime were to a large extent made noble. The middle of the 19th century saw a turning point in the interest in crime and deviance. The artists began focusing on the anatomy of the crime instead of its narrative. Deviance lost its noble allure. The artists focused on transferring deviance from the outside world (mythology, literature) to the inner world. Postmodern artists made themselves, death, crime and crime attributes their main project. Crime, deviance and death were deprived of their features of nobility; nevertheless they possessed a suggestive enticement. Artists reflect on crime by using different vantage points: that of a victim, a criminal or an observer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
