One of the trickiest parts of art – with the understanding that art is entirely made of tricky parts – is the comprehension of proportion and perspective. There is, in one sense, a lot of wiggle room here – we can see a drawing of a person with oversized hands or head and still parse and appreciate it, though perhaps as something more abstract or cartoonish than originally intended. This is a way in which art gets more difficult the more you improve: As a beginner, all you want to do is convey a basic visual impression, so if it looks basically like a Dracula, a Barbie, or a Spiderman it’s satisfactory. The beginner may have higher aspirations in terms of wanting it to look realistic or stylized in a particular manner, but seldom has a strong idea of what that means as applied to actual art and what sort of work it will entail: To the beginner, a piece might appear realistic just because it’s highly detailed, regardless of whether that detail is accurate.
As we develop as artists, we become more focused on creating a specific outcome, a complex emotion or slice of imagined or preserved or interpreted experience, and all of a sudden close enough isn’t close enough. The scale of a character’s parts comes to be an expressive channel, conveying traits and attitudes, and the scale of characters in relation to one another expresses their relationship and perspective. It’s not, of course, only relative size that can express in this manner. Distance, contrast, line weight and so forth can all work together to create a sense of perspective – both in the literal sense, by mimicking the behaviors of the ocular apparatus, and in the metaphorical, by creating an impressionistic view of the world shaped by the character’s relationship to it.
All of this is relatively basic, a core tenet of artistic expression and criticism: Artistic perspective can be warped and stylized for the purposes of character and narrative, not everything depicted is meant to represent a real or idealized world. Real Art 101 level stuff, and yet it seems that many audiences now have no sense of scale or perspective, abstraction or proportion, and this can have surprisingly severe ramifications.
Let’s start with the obvious: There seems to suddenly be a prevailing belief that any depiction of something unpleasant or gross is equivalent to endorsement of same. This is understandable as a sort of pendulum swing against art which was criticized, in most cases justly, as including racism and sexual violence and so forth for a transgressive thrill and then failing to couch that content in any coherent critical narrative or perspective. By not meaningfully challenging the implicit perspective these inclusions provided, these instances did create a generalized tacit endorsement – not of the transgressive acts themselves, but of the worldview of these as immutable, ever-present and ideologically neutral threats. Not long ago this was an omnipresent variety of bad and lazy art, and it is still quite common today. I absolutely understand why learning enough about art criticism to understand why this style is harmful, without learning enough to understand that not all art tackling the same topics is equivalent, could lead one to this misguided anger – but, nevertheless, misguided it is.
Unfortunately the problem is worse than just a few clueless but well-meaning amateur critics – though I suppose I occupy quite a glass house to be throwing that particular stone from. The lack of sense of scale, proportion, and perspective extends beyond art criticism. Depiction of sin becomes equivalent to endorsement of sin, endorsement equivalent to commission, and all sins lumped together into one evil mass such that whoever commits the least is deemed guilty of the worst. This is the direct intersection of largely reasonable media criticism, evangelical moral absolutism, and deranged “tough on crime” political discourse. Once we ascertain something to be “wrong” it must therefore be evil – and once evil it must be struck down by any means necessary. No context, proportion, scale, distance, or perspective are needed or desired.
Even very large things seem small at a distance, and even the smallest threats loom large up close. It’s so easy to give the huge entities whose roots strangle us a pass while we tear each other apart for trying to express the horrific perspective from the feet of these loathsome giants, and so the smallest most vulnerable artists tend to bear the brunt of the assault of this righteousness. Dedicated internet abusers see a free-for-all and gleefully join in the fun, and thus the ritual is complete and, by attempting to battle against callousness and cruelty, that same callousness and cruelty has been manifested into being. Afterwards, the clear viciousness of the engagement does nothing but undermine their well-meaning criticism, and brutalize the target of that criticism. Only the trolls, there for the violence in the first place, walking away laughing.
This will repeat over and over as long as we treat every transgression against taste and morality as equivalent. Not all sins are equal in harm; not all sinners are equal in power; not all battles, once won, will bring you closer to victory.