Is ‘creepy’ art?

Lately, the art world has produced works of a very unusual juxtaposition, one that earns the word by mixing familiar childhood images, such as teddy bears, dolls and happy little homes, with completely disturbing themes, such as blood, drowned corpses, slabs of meat and the decapitated head of Abraham Lincoln.\nThe first of these artists who caught my eye was Mark Ryden (www.markryden.com). Ryden is known for painting in the iconography and style of children’s books, portraying figures such as bunny rabbits, tea sets and blonde-haired children in a very full composition with pastel colors and extreme highlights. What makes his pictures drastically different from any image you would find in a children’s story is that these common elements are often intermixed with disturbing imagery. In his 2000 painting “The Butcher Bunny,” we see a young girl escorting a child-size Abraham Lincoln into a grotesque butcher’s shop with several slaughtered animal heads lying about and a giant, smiling rabbit sawing steaks.\nPhotographer Gregory Crewdson is known for his highly stylized critique of suburbia and the fracture of the American dream through visually arresting pictures. In his 2005 digital print “Untitled (Vanity From Beneath the Roses),” a blonde woman sits at a vanity in a large room that opens up to the rest of her spacious, suburban home. The entire household is dark except for the highlighted woman and the reflection of a pallid nude woman in the vanity. She looks almost corpselike and stares critically at the woman in the vanity. Critics have suggested theories that the woman is a reminder of her unfulfilled life, a dead secret from the past or even symbolic for her hidden lesbian reality. Whatever it means, it is certainly haunting, as most of these works are.\nSo what’s the deal with all the creepy? Is there a method to the madness? Is there a point to it all?\nI was at a Ball State University student art exhibit in middle school, and I saw a poster in the graphic design section that read, “Sometimes, beauty is a dark, writhing thing.” I was immediately a believer of the testimony, and I immediately began wearing nothing but dark green and black apparel accessorized with those awful rubber bracelets.\nI’m not suggesting that you go faux-goth-I’m-a-preteen-badass with your personal style, but I am suggesting that the next time you see an image that disturbs, try not to think of it as “weird” or “creepy.” Take the opportunity to think about the image, try to find out why it’s arresting to you, and consider what the artist is trying to express to you individually. The key is to remember that all images come from a memory bank. If an artist is combining depictions of memory, it’s obvious that he or she is giving them an unusual combination for a reason.\nIf you listen closely enough, you might hear a whisper of what they’re trying to say.