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The other day half the front page of the New York Times' arts section was filled with pictures of weird faces. A blurry photograph of a man who looked terrified of something….a multi-colored pastel of an evilly grinning creature with spotted teeth and an elephant's trunk nose…a drawing of a human face in which the eye and nose and open mouth are out of whack.
They were all works from an art show no right now in Santa Fe called “Disparities and Deformations: Our Grotesque.” It got a rave review. The exhibit includes work that ranges from Kara Walker's slaves-attacking-masters silhouettes to R. Crumb's cartoons of endearingly sweaty, shabby post-60s men and women.
That very same day, I happened to get an email from a friend about two brand new toy lines.
One is a line of hand puppets called Puppet Terrors that include Death Row Joe. He's a murderer in an orange prison jumpsuit. And Clause a Nazi Santa Clause character.
The other new toy line is called Tranimals, and they too are deliberately ugly. And the thing is, these toys are typical of products marketed to 8- and 9- and 10-year olds these days.
From young to old and high to low, our culture is in love with the grotesque… in love with the amusingly monstrous and the tongue-in-cheek freakish. It's a dominant theme in contemporary entertainment and art.
Think about it. In music there's heavy metal and gangsta rap, on radio, Howard Stern and all the shock jocks. And on TV? People eating vermin on the reality series Fear Factor.
Clip: Fear Factor
Shows like Jerry Springer that turn over rocks to let us gawk at human vermin... as well as the vile and very funny worlds of Deadwood and The Sopranos on HBO.
So is the culture suddenly going to hell in a hand-basket?
Maybe – but you know, it's nothing new.
In fact, I realized, the 100% wholesome, pretty, happy culture that we tried to build in the middle of the last century, that was the anomaly .
Back in the 17 th and 18 th centuries, we had had writers like Swift with his giants and midgets, and artists like Hyronymous Bosch and Hogarth painting various flavors of hells-on-earth, all reveling in the hideous and ridiculous and overripe.
The 19 th century in Europe began with Goya's dark, grotesque antiwar paintings and Mary Shelly's Frankenstein monster. As recently as the 1930s, deformity still passed for carnival entertainment, like in Tod Browning's famous film Freaks.
Clip: Freaks
But then starting in the 1940s, American culture scrubbed itself to a slick, rosy, happy sheen. It was the age of Norman Rockwell and Walt Disney and Hugh Hefner – whether wholesome or sexy, mainstream America repressed and ignored and denied the grotesque.
The only major cultural impresario celebrating the grotesque back then was William Gaines. He's the man whose gleefully bloody EC comic books provoked a Senate investigation in the early 50s.
Clip of the hearings
And then Gaines founded MAD magazine, with its cretinous mascot Alfred E. Newman and rude fascination with pimples and orthodonture and fat people and body odor.
As in all realms, the 1960s changed everything and ushered in a general revival of the perverse and grotesque. At the high end with novelists like Kurt Vonnegut and visual artists like Diane Arbus, the photographer, and in pop music too.
Clip of the Beatles' Maxwell's Silver Hammer: “Bang, bang Maxwell's silver hammer came down upon her head, clang, clang Maxwell's sliver hammer made sure that she was dead…”
And since then, depictions of the grotesque have only become more perverse and more widespread.
In other words, life has gotten back….to…normal.
