Theodor Adorno, in his great essay “Commitment,” warned against works of art, even well-meaning ones, that “turn suffering into images” and thereby cannot help but also turn this suffering into a form of enjoyment for an audience to consume at its leisure. In these “tragic” works, the victims of suffering, Adorno writes, “are used to create something, works of art, that are then thrown to the consumption of a world which destroyed them. The so-called artistic representation of the sheer physical pain of people beaten to the ground by rifle-butts contains, however remotely, the power to elicit enjoyment out of it.” The common denominator of most of the works that fall into this trap, Adorno concludes, is the simplistic insistence “that even in so-called extreme situations, indeed in them most of all, humanity flourishes … the distinction between executioners and victims becomes blurred; both, after all, are equally suspended above the possibility of nothingness, which of course is generally not quite so uncomfortable for the executioners.” [1]

Anthony Alessandrini “Revisiting Arna’s Children” (via hassibah)