This is an important and frequently surprising book. By reframing the history of the avant-garde in terms of cruelty…Nelson is taking on modernism's (and postmodernism's) most cherished tenets. After all, aesthetic shock has under­written most of our cultural innovation for over a century. So this book could be read as the foundation for a post-avant-garde aesthetics…Nelson's opinions can be quirky and hard to square with one another, but they never fail to be interesting, quite some accomplishment in what could have been a free-form ramble through the mires of someone else's aesthetic preoccupations.
—The New York Times

The gory, brutal images that swamp modern culture are stupefying and dehumanizing —or maybe not, argues this richly ambivalent study. Poet Nelson (Bluets) surveys cruel art, lowbrow and high, flitting among Hollywood torture-porn and sadistic reality shows, avant-garde films and performance pieces, poetry and literary fiction, and photographs of abused Abu Ghraib prisoners. She repeatedly circles back to a few cruelty auteurs like the painter Francis Bacon and the poet Sylvia Plath. This panorama provokes strong reactions in her, but no dogmas. Nelson rejects the modernist claim that brutality in art provokes cathartic reactions that shock us out of alienation and into social justice, but rejects also the notion that cruel art makes people cruel; she wearies of the entertainment industry's cynical assaults on taste and sensibility—"‘neither I nor the world will be a better place if I ingest a particular cruelty'"—while celebrating provocations that she believes have an undeniable artistic power. Nelson's erudition and wide fluency in artistic and philosophical traditions yield many subtle, insightful readings (her meditation on "brutal honesty" is especially good). But her view of her lurid subject is sometimes too nuanced and unsatisfying. (July)

"[Nelson] dexterously, and creatively, manages to hold a mirror to our culture’s fascination with cruelty and invites us to reflect on our personal reasons for indulging it."

"I hope that critics, and aspiring critics, and those who are interested in the relationship between art and ethics, read [The Art of Cruelty]."

"[Nelson’s] critiques of individual artists are delightfully fierce without being mean spirited… Fascinating and bracingly intelligent…The Art of Cruelty’s prose is often gorgeous."

"A lean-forward experience, and in its most transcendent moments, reading it can feel like having the best conversation of your life."

An important and frequently surprising book . . . could be read as the foundation for a post-avant-garde aesthetics . . . Nelson, who is also a poet, is such a graceful writer that I . . . just sat back and enjoyed the show.” ---New York Times

An important and frequently surprising book . . . could be read as the foundation for a post-avant-garde aesthetics . . . Nelson, who is also a poet, is such a graceful writer that I . . . just sat back and enjoyed the show. —New York Times