Dark Art: The Changing Face of Public Relations

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Can empower normal people to stand up to it. Expect the Establishment to be a Hypocrite that wields these arts in secret (or openly) to oppress the people. Necromancy. Although it is not evil or corrupting in itself and some spells can actually be used for good, it almost always involves gruesome rituals or blood sacrifice. And its foremost practitioners (but not the only ones, and not even the first ones) are the Deathlords and Abyssal Exalted, who are evil by most standards. Despite dissent towards witchcraft, The Catholic Church wasn’t entirely against magic. The church believed ceremonial Magic was evil, as they thought it relied on making pacts with spirits, while another type of magic, natural magic, was permitted as practitioners of it claimed to be using natural processes, not spirits, to do supernatural feats. These natural magics usually were composed of The Hermetic Arts and the primary types of magic used were Alchemy: The replication of geological phenomena through manual craft and early experimentation with medical herbs, and Astrology: The prediction of events and diving of information through the observation of celestial body movements. The Confederacy in the Hostile Takeover (Swann) series bans LEGO Genetics of humans or other sapients (explicitly including new types of Moreau), A.I. in any form, and Nanomachines likewise. The first two date from the devastating wars immediately preceding the Moreau Series, the third from a Grey Goo incident on Titan. This prohibition is so strong that Orbital Bombardment of any community found to be practicing them is considered restrained. Sterilizing the entire planet is also on the table. Improvised Explosives. While modern technology makes it impossible to completely eradicate such knowledge, the authorities become VERY unhappy if they find out you know this stuff.

Champions supplement The Blood and Dr. McQuark. People on the planet Ea are forbidden to use magic or powers that involve interdimensional travel because it could lead to the unleashing of Eldritch Abominations. Although it sounds utterly redundant to say, the point must be made that Dark Art conveys something dark to its audience. A Dark Art sculpture of a wilting flower is not conveying a sense of Wabi Sabi, a seascape is not providing a sense of majesty or adventure, a beautiful portrait is not simply a faithful reproduction of the sitter. What this ‘darkness’ is remains a complex question, although I personally lean towards a psychological framing, with anxieties, desires, and implications of the ‘Shadow’ being reflected through the cultural focus of the monster, and unconsciously communicated through colour, composition, and mark making. To this day no respectable medical scientist admits using knowledge gained from Josef Mengele's archives. He was such a bad scientist that there is nothing to glean from his files. The experiments performed by Imperial Japan's Unit 731 were at least as bad as Mengele's experiments, but the people involved got away with it, because the U.S. government offered them amnesty in exchange for their research. Some of them are still alive and still claim that vivisecting human beings without anesthesia was a perfectly sensible and moral thing to do. There's some categorization in-universe on the seriousness of offensive magic, as such spells are called either jinxes, hexes or curses. Jinxes are defined by Word of God as "spells whose effects are irritating but amusing". Hexes are darker, intended to cause some pain or discomfort, while curses are described as "the worst kinds of dark magic". Three in particular, the "Unforgivable Curses"— Crucio, Avada Kedavra, and Imperio— are so called because any use of them is punishable by life in prison. Villains use them all the time, naturally, but our heroes will only consider it after crossing the Godzilla Threshold. The three Twilight Invocations grant greater power than the Radiant Invocations, but each comes with both risk and moral flaw.

Moving into modern, and post-modern times we find Goya, Bacon, Bourgeois, Hirst and countless others producing work that would not look out of place in an exhibition of Dark Art and yet it is certain that these artists would not have considered themselves within the grouping of work we are discussing.

Dark art does not hold with the idealist visions of modernism, and holds interest in subjects and subjective reality, rather than exploration of materials. It is often anti-authoritarian, aware of its own place within wider culture, and sometimes humorous and self deprecating. As such, work created during and prior to the modernist movement, does not truly belong to Dark Art. Daedric "Ritual Magic" (the kind used by most mortals to commune with the Daedric Princes and to permanently summon/bind lesser Daedra) is almost universally considered this, though exceptions may be made for those invoking the Daedric Princes considered to be "Good." So, if we can find the roots of Dark Art throughout history, where do we find a true starting point? There seems to be a common agreement that Bekinski and Giger are, if not explicitly part of Dark Art, then certainly represent its forefathers. In The Wheel of Time, the problem is largely irrelevant in the beginning of the story because the only people openly channeling are the Aes Sedai, who willingly put themselves under a powerful Geas that prevents them from doing anything really bad with it. Nevertheless, some One Power weaves and uses are seen as evil: Bazil Broketail: The Masters of Padmasa along with their servants practice magic which involves drawing blood, inflicting pain or killing to work. It's used for creating horrific war monsters.Interestingly, infernal charms with the Heretical keyword are considered the Dark Arts by the demon princes themselves, since most of them are designed to allow Infernal Exalted to free themselves from their patrons and become their equals. A few charms are even labelled as both Blasphemy and Heretical, which means that both Heaven and Hell freak out if you use them. In Less Wrong parlance, this is used to refer to the use of faulty logic, fallacies and self-deception , Double Speak... in two words: Bad Faith . Even for ultimately good purposes, those arts are a double-edged sword. Truth, and logic, ultimately, always win. The Dying Cubs camp of the Red Talons practices a rite that "feeds" the earth with the pain of a tortured human. The rite cleanses the land and lowers the Gauntlet of the immediate area, but the effects are temporary. Moreover, spiritual guardians of the region will no longer defend the land against Wyrm incursions. With both of these artists rising to prominence in the 1960s and 70s, we are well served to look to other cultural changes happening in the west around this time. The rapid expansion of counter cultures in this time period (notably the freak, hippy, and punk trends) were rooted in questioning of authority and saw collective cultural fear, which is most readily identified by studying the production of horror movies, shift from the terrors of mad science, to fears centred in society itself. Depiction of possession, cults, serial killers, and zombies started to rise as the monster became an invading force from within.

I contend that we must view Dark Art as a movement, as we do Surrealism, Expressionism, or the Pre Raphaelites, and that to do this, we must define the attributes of Dark Art that set it apart from other aesthetically similar works.On the "misunderstood" side of things, Dishonored: Death of the Outsider emphasizes the fact that the Outsider himself is not inherently evil or good, and the people who made him into what he is, without having direct access to the magic, are much worse. Essentially, the powers of the Void are just tools, and it is up to the caster for how they decide to use them, though direct connection to the Void is akin to a magical variation on radiation poisoning. Setting aside the absurdity of referring to ‘Dark Artism’ or the more painful and somewhat problematic ‘Darkism’. We must consider the question of a Dark Art movement. I hear the term used regularly, and there is in fact an organisation named that (attached to the British Macabre Gallery among others). However, in the absence of a ‘Manifestoes of Dark Art’ what does such a movement intend to achieve? Certainly the promotion of Dark Art is a cultural and commercial objective for all of us, but to what end? A lot of what humans know about the effects of freezing and phosgene gas on the human body comes from Nazi experimentation - the ethical debates are still raging. One side holds that it is inherently tainted due to the sheer evil acts that were committed to gain them, while the other holds that not using available knowledge to save lives is cowardly at best or hypocritical at worst.