Last week, we received a CD from a punk band calling themselves Mindless Self Indulgence. The album featured a number of exciting looking tracks, including “Holy Shit” and “Dicks are for my Friends.”

I remember when I was a wee lad of the fifth grade my friend Ryan brought a copy of Guns N’ Roses “Appetite for Destruction” to basketball practice. I had never heard profanity on an album before, and I was amazed.

I grant you that no child should be without the discovery of digitally recorded swear words, but the shtick of bands like Mindless Self Indulgence has become very tired.

Art has the potential to be shocking, but how much of what attempts to shock us actually does so anymore?

In the mid-1970s, when the New York punk scene first began, fans spiked and dyed their hair, dressed differently and pierced themselves in order to shock mainstream society. The clothing was an extension of the attitude of the punk movement, and it was successful in separating itself from the mainstream, and shocking the general public.

Today, when you see someone dressed like Iggy Pop, you think “Oh, wow, a punk.” There’s nothing shocking about it, because you’ve seen a hundred other people dressed the same way. The guy who dyes his hair green and pierces his tongue is really no different from the guy wearing the Tommy jeans and the Abercrombie hat.

There have been times in history when something shocking was exactly what the art world and society in general needed. The Sex Pistols may not be the best band ever, but what they represented at the time justified their presence.

Far too many people still think that by simply shocking people they can create something of artistic merit. In the first place, it’s almost impossible to shock people anymore, and in the second place, just because you do shock people doesn’t mean your art is any good.

Marilyn Manson is the most obvious example. No matter how much he may rile up parent groups, his music will still be terrible. The riff from “The Beautiful People” could have been written and performed by a chimpanzee with gloves on.

Any number of performance artists approach the same level of irrelevance. Just because someone eats human feces doesn’t mean that a performance is any good.

People like Marilyn Manson and the members of Mindless Self Indulgence need to understand that it’s time to raise the bar. Far too much music, film and visual art refuses to even attempt to connect with its audience on any emotional level.

Is it because of some heightened post-modern rejection of traditional form? No. It’s because people are lazy.

Abstraction is one of the key components of any artistic endeavor, but when it is done simply for its own sake it fails miserably.

I was flagging through a book about Picasso once when I came to a series of drawings of a bull. He began with an incredibly realistic drawing, and gradually, in a series of steps, removed a few less important lines at a time. The end product was a beautifully simple drawing of about five lines, which represented the bull every bit as well as the original drawing did.

Too many artists think they can skip the realistic part and move straight to the abstract. Definition and logic suggest that you need something to abstract from. Anything else is just laziness.

To produce a quality piece of art takes talent, time and effort. Throwing together a bunch of crap and calling it abstract or shocking is just a cop-out.

I sincerely hope artists will begin to see that work that doesn’t attempt to achieve some sort of emotional connection is lame, masturbatory and dated.

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Ben Godar is a senior in sociology from Grinnell.