In 1976, artist Kim Jones entered the Union Gallery at the California State University, Los Angeles. His body was caked in mud, he wore an elaborate wooden structure on his back and a pair of tights over his face. He wandered around the gallery, barking poetry and undressing until naked. He then unveiled a cage containing three live rats. He doused the rats in lighter fluid and set fire to them. As the animals screamed in agony, he screamed alongside them. The audience stood horrified, then fled. After the performance, Jones was charged with animal cruelty. The director of the gallery was fired.

It appears, on a simple reading of these facts, that Jones’s act is impossible to justify. Animals should never be killed for the sake of art. This was pure, undiluted cruelty with no redeemable aspect. But dig a little deeper and the moral ambiguities start to shift. Jones was a Vietnam vet who wanted to alert people to the hypocrisy of war, pain and violence. The university where the piece took place killed hundreds of animals every year in laboratory experiments, while millions of rats are exterminated in equally cruel ways all the time. Billions of animals are killed every year to feed us. So who, exactly, is the monster?

Cardiff University philosophy professor Dr Daisy Dixon has decided to tackle the issues surrounding aesthetics and ethics head on in Depraved: The Story of Dangerous Art. She surveys everything from prehistoric cave paintings, Renaissance art, the Impressionists, De Sade, Black Metal and video games and applies the historic, philosophic, societal and racial framework to these controversial or, in some cases, utterly anodyne pieces.

In the book she asks what should we do, if anything, with work we find cruel and repugnant. Should we accept or censor seemingly innocuous art created by corrupt individuals or pieces that underpin injustice or glamorise abhorrent figures or ideas? And in the ever-shifting cultural landscape of the early 21st century, what even is “immoral”?

Dixon argues in her book ‘Depraved’ that art can be used in a variety of ways to shape opinion or establish a certain viewpoint

“When we talk about what makes an artwork immoral,” Dixon tells me, “it’s important to tease out what we actually mean by that. Was it made by someone immoral? Does it have immoral consequences? I hadn’t really seen a book that dealt with all of that. How artworks can actually oppress people. They’re not just these passive, inert objects that are pleasant or unpleasant to experience, but they actively shape the world.”

Dixon contests that depraved art can be divided into five distinct categories: obscenity, criminality, oppression, malevolence and cruelty. Some works display depraved acts; others are made by depraved people. Some exert a malicious influence and others are used for malign control. The author doesn’t hold back in illustrating the potential immoral repugnance of certain pieces, though I suggest that some may take exception with masterpieces by Titian, particularly his Rape of Europa, being branded as depraved.

“I grew up adoring Titian – he is still one of my favourite artists,” she explains. “What I want to say in the book is that these masterpieces are beautiful, but can be a form of hate speech at the same time. I don’t mean to reduce them. These are complex objects. But these kinds of paintings were often commissioned for upper-class families to show new brides how to be a good wife and to teach her virtues like chastity and submissiveness. Once you actually place these artworks in their context, they’re doing lots of things, but they’re also normalising sexual violence.”

While the patriarchal subtext of Renaissance masterpieces may be challenging to some readers, other pieces discussed by Dixon are more obviously depraved. She delves into highly controversial works such as A Serbian Film, considered the most controversial movie ever made, featuring child abuse and a snuff film plot line; Makode Linde’s Painful Cake, which saw the artist donning ghoulish blackface; a video game dedicated to rape; and Carolee Schneemann’s Meat Joy, involving naked performers, writhing in raw meat to classic pop tunes, which caused such a stir when it was first performed that an audience member attempted to strangle the artist.

The removal of the statue of Edward Colston in Bristol in 2020. ‘That [the removal] was a way of rearranging the artwork. The way it was engaged with and removed was what was so spectacular, a kind of counter-speech,’ Dixon says (Photo: Ben Birchall/PA)

“I’m not particularly interested in defining what art is – I take a deliberately broad approach to it,” Dixon explains. “Video games are a kind of artwork, mainly because they have their kind of fiction and you participate in creating that world. There are games that push racist agendas. So in that sense, they’re even closer to art because they’ve created these fictional worlds to push an agenda.”

As Dixon points out in Depraved, art can be used in a variety of ways to shape opinion or establish a certain viewpoint.

“Take Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion’s ‘WAP’,” Dixon tells me. “I love that song. But the outcry and the shock and the disgust at it was astonishing. Because it was a particularly explicit ode to female pleasure. In a lot of hip-hop songs, you have men talking about being turned on. And it’s celebrated, right? But if a woman of colour does it, it’s condemned as obscene.”

What Dixon offers isn’t some blanket, anti-art treatise, but rather a plea for us to engage with art more. Not to simply see and consume the surface image before us, but to delve more deeply into its connotations, its background and its context. And yes, that does sometimes mean not separating the art from the artist.

“People hear me say you can’t separate, for instance, Picasso’s attitudes towards women or Gauguin’s abuse of children from his art. They think I’m saying we should burn all these paintings to the ground. People feel very protective, and they take a very polarised position. But really we need to sort of meet in the middle. And acknowledging an artwork has an immoral message doesn’t entail censorship. It’s a very polarising debate and some people oversimplify a complicated issue.”

There are provocative ideas in the book that not everyone will agree with. Dixon approved of the removal of the statue of slave trader Edward Colston in Bristol, considering the destruction of the piece as an artwork in itself.

“With the Colston statue, it was this sonic, very emotional re-curation that became a kind of performance in the way it briefly sat underwater. That was a way of rearranging the artwork. The way it was engaged with and removed was what was so spectacular, a kind of counter-speech. That’s how you remove the hate speech, not just by quietly melting them down, or quietly moving them into a dusty cupboard.”

Given the broad scope of Dixon’s book – which finds the depraved in the innocuous, recommends recontextualising the problematic and finds worth in some of the artworld’s most shocking pieces – it begs the question, how should we approach depraved art?

“In the book I try to treat artworks as these very complex things. They’re not going to be all bad and not going to be all good. Even the really immoral works like Rat Piece have value to them. Artworks can be both. It’s not a contradiction to say something’s both immoral and not immoral at the same time. They’re just both sitting awkwardly in a work of art. And we have to wrestle with that.”

‘Depraved: The Story of Dangerous Art’ by Daisy Dixon is published by Faber