The Guilty Pleasures of Art

April 25, 2011 - PRLog -- Most of us equate guilty pleasures with the “Seven Mortal Sins:” pride, wrath, envy, sloth, lust, gluttony, and avarice. It is a compact and convenient formulation. Sins have been catalogued for our use. We need not concern ourselves with other sins not mentioned. We sin, we feel remorse or guilt, we repent (or not). So runs the usual course of events in the “sinful” world.

But are these sins truly guilty pleasures? Or are some of them pleasures followed by guilt? Suppose we were to define a guilty pleasure essentially as a dual – or divided and simultaneous – state of consciousness: pleasure and remorse in the same instant. Then we would need to rule out most of the Seven Sins. Sloth, anger, pride, and envy would go, because such states completely absorb us either into an engulfing awareness of the state (such as feeling wrathful) or into unconsciousness (although sloth straddles a boundary here, and could be considered a guilty pleasure if it did not consist completely of being unconscious).

Moreover, can we truly say that we enjoy being angry or envious? States of mind brought about by stupefacient agents like alcohol, drugs, or even sleep are also eliminated in this formulation. In all of these sins, the self-censor or self-judge customarily speaks (if ever) only after normal consciousness resumes. Sins committed in haste and repented of at leisure do not qualify here as guilty pleasures.

The quote from Proverbs elegantly sums up the elements of this concept of guilty pleasure. To exist, this state must encompass sharp awareness of the pleasurable act in the moment of its commission and, simultaneously, awareness of its sinfulness. Concealment is essential. Fear of scrutiny or discovery is an inevitable concomitant – the “observer” of one’s own conscience playing the role of censor and judge and serving as a safe stand-in for the dreaded outside witness. The dialectic of enjoyment and painful guilt only serves to increase excitement, heightens our awareness of pleasure…and thus intensifies the pleasure itself.

To illustrate these ideas, consider six states of guilty pleasure:

Continued, with photographs, at
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