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The Ethics of Art



Shara McCallum

Poet

2021-22 Penn State Laureate

BA, University of Miami; MFA, University of Maryland; Ph.D., Binghamton University

In speaking of art, we often focus on considerations of aesthetics, on contexts and values that allow a work of art to be regarded as beautiful. When we pinpoint a writer’s leaning toward simple versus complex language or a painter’s tendency toward abstract or representational expression, we are in the realm of parsing aesthetics. We’re seeking to describe how an artist inscribes their definition of beauty through the work itself.

As a writer who has wrestled with personal narratives alongside public histories, I’m not only interested in my aesthetic reasons for doing so. Equally, I’m drawn to interrogate the ethics underpinning my compulsion to revisit the past. What is the gravity of the story I am trying to bring into the present? What is my moral compass as the writer when engaging with the silences and discordances of history? What good do I hope for the finished work to do in the world?

Perhaps more than other kinds of artists, writers are frequently tempted to pick up the pen and use it, as the adage loosely goes, as a sword. Many writers are spurred to write out of a past that has been in some sense injurious — the twined histories of family and nation are a wound to which many rightly attend. But to write out of a wound is qualitatively different than to write with the intent to wound. Sidestepping whether engaging in writing as a martial art diminishes the human being who writes, writing without keen awareness of one’s ethics — not only aesthetics — often results in diminished vision for the work itself.

With my most recent book, No Ruined Stone, the ethical questions of the project resounded. The book offers a speculative account of history based on the life of 18th century Scottish poet Robert Burns and his near migration to Jamaica to work on a slave plantation. In recreating a figure as totemic to Scottish history and culture as Burns, I had to answer for not only how I would recreate Burns’ voice but also why I needed to do so in the first place. What right did I have to revise his life and legacy? What were my stakes in the braided story of Scotland and Jamaica? What was I willing to risk in stepping back into a past steeped in the violence of slavery and colonization?

Burns’ near contemporary and fellow poet John Keats famously said: “Truth is beauty, beauty truth.” While I’ve largely written here about the need to look at the ethics of art, it’s because this seems to garner far less of our attention than does pondering aesthetics. But ultimately, I agree with Keats — what is beautiful is what is truthful. They are one and the same. With writing about the past this means trying to see past one’s own, limited vantage point. To work to bring to light the complex narratives of who we have been as they shape who we are now.

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