Violence In Art

A complex physical force of nature, violence is portrayed as more than just a cruel and brute force in both Maggie Nelson’s “Great to Watch,” and Tim O’Brien’s “How to Tell a True War Story.” Art is an expression of the human imagination and violence is used as a form of art. Some people tend to define violence as another form of expression- one of hostility, aggression, and anger. Art is an expression of creation, whereas violence is an expression of destruction, which Nelson and O’Brien observe the media and authors try to use to get others to confront the realities of life. Both writers believe that the message people attempt to create, by using violence as a form of art, gets distorted and often creates more problems than solutions. Although
Nelson points out that violence is complex and she demonstrates this in mentioning of the Hub, a site that shows a “rapid image flow” of brutal pictures such as Nangpa Pass shooting (304). As seen through her many examples, Nelson has a plethora of knowledge so she explains when she sees visuals of the Nangpa shooting incident on the Hub, she feels it is an “exceptionally poor platform on which to place the unending, arduous, multifaceted, and circuitous process of ‘changing the world’” (304). By this, Nelson means that using violence to send messages often makes it difficult to perceive the main idea. She uses those words, “rapid image flow” to show that the Hub is not a very effective means of explaining the issue and what people can do to help. Instead, she explains, the constant flow of visuals just bombard people with distasteful images and that makes the images lose their meaning and people do not understand they need to help. In light of the Hub’s weak attempt of trying to portray human suffering, Nelson mentions that the form of media that has gained more attention is reality programming. While Nelson focuses on the influence of the media, Tim O’Brien focuses on the details of the story and how they distort the moral of the story. This is seen in his example of Mitchell Sanders and how he makes up all these details just to captivate his listeners, but at the end of the day the moral of his story is the quiet. O’Brien compares these details to threads in a cloth when he says, “You can’t tease it out. You can’t extract the meaning without unraveling the deeper meaning” (321). Just how Nelson explains, there has to be some sort of appeal when depicting the brutality of life, O’Brien is explaining that the details or threads create the appeal that leave the readers wanting to find out what the message of the story is and if it is true or not. These details and