Las cosas como son y otras fantasías

Is there art morally reprehensible? Or is art immune to moral judgment? The most helpful answers that are offered in the public sphere to these questions seem to corner us so that we choose between the options of a solemn dilemma. Either the total suspension of the moral judgment about the work of art is demanded or the verdict of criminal law is mimicked: guilty or innocent. In this essay, Pau Luque argues that this is a false dilemma. Moral judgment is more complex and messy than those two positions imply. The work of Nick Cave, Nabokov's Lolita and The Sea, the Sea, by Iris Murdoch, the leading threads of this book, suggest that the most fruitful moral judgment is the one that perches on the literary imagination, not the one that seeks absolution or condemn it. At the same time, and on the basis of the comparison between the key scenes of Irreversible by Gaspar Noé and The Pianist by Michael Haneke, it makes sense to speak of morally indecent art. The difference that would mediate between imaginative art and indecent art is the same that would mediate between the imaginative narration of abject characters and the abject narration of imagined characters. The essay also explores other questions related to imagination: what is the place that writers and artists should occupy in newspapers and magazines; why cultivating the literary imagination is a way to challenge a misogynistic cliché; how can we better understand what power is when we imagine it; or in what way the much idolized and invoked empathy can hide ignoble intentions. An intelligent and agile book, which delves into the complex relationships between morals and fiction, which are once again -or perhaps never have been- at the center of the debate.