Art and Bioethics: Shifts in Understanding Across Genres

Abstract

This paper describes and discusses overlapping interests and concerns of art and bioethics and suggests that bioethics would benefit from opening to contributions from the arts. There is a description of recent events in bioethics that have included art, and trends in art that relate to bioethics. The paper outlines art exhibits and performances within two major international bioethics congress programs alongside a discussion of the work of leading hybrid and bio artists who experiment with material (including their own bodies) at the ambiguous intersections between art, bio art and bioethics. Their work seeks to engage audiences in challenging ethical precepts and assumptions about life and existence. We consider the response of art and social theorists and compare these with the responses of bioethicists to comparable cases in bioethics. We note divergent views within the arts and within bioethics in relation to some pivotal questions including questions about what limits, if any, can apply in particular cases and on what basis. This approach allows for a transfer of information and perspectives, challenges assumptions in both art and bioethics and opens up a space for future exchange and dialogue along the shifting borders between these genres.

The arts and medicine: a challenging relationship

“…Art often sets out to shock our sensibilities and question our limits to taste” 27. This is to draw “attention to the transgressive nature of art” and artists who “challenge societal norms working with and against the boundaries of taste and expectation” 28. The role of the humanities is not therefore to “tiptoe through the minefield, leaving the mines intact and loaded” but to accept that provocation and discomfort (if not explosions) play a valuable role in learning 26.…”

“…These operations have been broadcast live to galleries around the world as “baroque theatrical performances… in which she and her medical attendants wore fashion-designer costumes” 28. Poetry reading and music accompanied the surgery, in an operating theatre decorated with large bowls of grapes.…”

“…As provocations in the context of medical education, their work raises many questions concerning the role of medicine; whether we are indeed moving to a technologically augmented cyborg body; and ethical questions about whether any of this is ethically acceptable for art, or medicine, and on what basis 28. Art is not immune from demands for social and ethical responsibility (Zylinska, p 149–74) 44 45.…”

“…Doll ‘A’, for example, represents “the worry about Absolute Truths and people who think they hold them” 47. This artwork is “both ‘tongue-in-cheek’ and serious in attempting to draw attention to assumptions and ethical conventions within art, science and culture and open these up for critique and deeper understanding” 28. Similarly, Julia Reodica cultivated her own vaginal cells for a 2004 project ‘hymeNextTM’ to produce a series of artificial hymens that “aim to confront modern sexuality, and provoke thought on the female body and the emphasis placed on virginity” (Zylinska, p 161) 45 48.…”

“…This occurs when students are expected to read a novel to gain a particular understanding—where the teacher has a prescribed agenda in mind. The value of the arts and humanities is in their open-ended support of questioning, and their potential to “enliven and animate… and develop new forms of engagement that allow for participation and discovery through enactment and embodiment and not just through abstraction or theory” 28. It derives (in part) from a capacity of art to generate controversy and debate about the meaning and implications of the work and the subjects referred to.…”