In 2014, Lady Gaga performed Swine—a song about being raped by a music producer at 19—while an artist onstage shoved two fingers down her throat and vomited rainbow paint across Gaga’s body. The performance was disturbing. It was also the most precise depiction of the feelings of shame, disgust, and paralysis of sexual violence I have ever seen. She did not merely describe her trauma; she made you feel a fraction of it.
The performance raises questions about what trauma-based art accomplishes. Disgust does not undo rape, and catharsis does not constitute restorative justice. Some see art that engages with violence as a luxury of those who can afford to aestheticize pain rather than endure it. Yet art’s power lies not in repair but in revelation: It exposes what violence conceals, insists that suffering be seen, and transforms recognition itself into a form of resistance.
In that way, the effects of art are not solely therapeutic or ornamental; they are epistemic. They alter our perception of reality, collapsing the emotional distance between experience and witness that makes apathy possible. Art has the unique ability to transmit the pain of the few into the conscience of the many. In doing so, it serves as a medium for revelation, transmission, and survival.
Psychology has long known what politics refuses to learn: Intellectualizing our emotions doesn’t resolve them; it represses them. Therapists call it a defence mechanism—the mind’s way of avoiding what the body already knows. What occurs in the individual psyche also operates at the collective level. Entire nations learn to rationalize horror, to translate it into data and debate. But if emotional repression keeps individuals stuck in cycles of trauma, moral repression does the same to societies.
In an interview with The Tribune, Eric Lewis, associate professor in McGill’s Philosophy department, traced the intellectual roots of this repression to nineteenth-century formalism—a European art theory that defined a work’s value by its structure rather than its emotional or social content.
“From my perspective, it's really hard to see how you could actually imagine art merely to be decorative,” he said. “That really is a product of a particular moment in time in European, North American theorizing about art. [....] But it stands in stark contrast to a much longer tradition of viewing art, in some sense, instrumentally, socially and politically.”
Originally aesthetic, formalism rapidly gained prominence amidst the logic of capitalist modernity, which privileges abstraction, exchange value, and efficiency over affective meaning. As art became increasingly commodified, emotion was recast as excess: Something to be managed rather than engaged. What began as a style of interpretation hardened into an ideology that treats feeling as a threat to reason. And when societies learn to distrust emotion, they become easier to govern through abstraction.
Politically regressive and reactionary governments have long known this, and that is why they continue to wage a war on empathy—and by extension, on art.
“One of Hitler's very first proclamations upon being made chancellor was to ban what was called at the time, ‘Negro art.’ [....] You know, in 1969, in the aftermath of the Paris student riots in France, the French banned a jazz and new rock music festival, fearing that would reignite the kind of protest movement,” Lewis said. “Going back in the Western philosophical tradition […] Plato literally bans certain musical modes because he believes they incite turbulent emotions that could yield in violent and active behaviour.”
Yet the capacity of art to move people is what makes it politically indispensable. By collapsing the distance between viewer and subject, art does what reason cannot.
“One thing that has to happen in order to convince folks to not just cognitively believe in anti-racism […] but to get them to actually modify their own behaviours [...] is somehow transmitting to folks who are the oppressors what it feels like to experience oppression,” he explained. “[That is] something pure argumentative text is not very good at doing, but that's something that Nina Simone is very good at doing, that Jean Michel Basquiat is very good at doing, that Nikki Giovanni is very good at doing.”
Palestinian artist Khaled Hussein is a prime example of how art anchors social change in care for the individual rather than allegiance to an abstract ideology. Hussein’s exhibition features various sculptures of legs, unassuming at first glance—mere limbs suspended in space, painted in muted tones—until one looks closely and reads the title: i miss you so much. The sculptures represent parts of bodies that no longer exist. Gaza has the largest number of child amputees anywhere in the world—a fact too easily diluted to numbers, until Hussein’s art renders it human again.
“It is true that amputees are everywhere, but a large portion of these victims are confined to their homes, reliving their physical and psychological pain, away from the eyes of others,” Hussein said in an interview with ArtZone Palestine. “I wanted people to recognize that something unseen can still wound us.”
His work takes mass tragedy and scales it down to an individual wound, pulling the viewer’s focus away from debates about the definition of genocide and ‘who came first’ and instead toward the innocent people at the heart of it all. Sadly, the violence Hussein confronted in his art did not spare him: Israeli occupation forces bombed his house and Gallery 28 in Rafah, displacing him and reducing his art to rubble.
A representative of Students for Palestine’s Honour and Resistance (SPHR) at McGill, who wished to remain anonymous, reiterated Hussein’s sentiment about focusing on those directly affected by tragedy. For SPHR, discomfort is not a weakness of art, but its ethical function—it reminds us that no amount of physical distance from the genocide absolves us, and our institutions, of complicity.
“When images of the occupation and genocide are used, we need to remember this is what our academic institutions are knowingly funding, and it should absolutely make us uncomfortable.”
A similar idea plays out in Ibtisam Azem’s The Book of Disappearance, in which every Palestinian vanishes overnight. The premise may appear speculative, but Azem’s realism lies in the details; after all, the book imagines a reality that some already wish for, and that history has made possible in increments.
The novel’s Israeli narrator—a “friend of the Palestinians”— slowly inherits what isn’t his: His friend’s apartment, his coffee, even his words. Erasure here is not a single event but an accumulation of small actions, such as the choice to call the city ‘Tel Aviv’ as opposed to Jaffa, or to sign a lease for a home whose owners left in 1948.
The novel thus collapses the moral distance between complicity and atrocity, reminding readers that the scale of destruction we see today is sustained by millions of such minor, plausible gestures.
The moment art leaves the page, the screen, or the gallery, it begins to circulate. As it weaves itself into conversations, gatherings, and protests, it transforms private emotion into public action.
In an interview with The Tribune, Montreal-based photographer William Wilson emphasized the importance of art in shaping public opinion and propelling activism.
“The level of grotesque violence that you see […] does inform the political opinions of people. The more severe the images […] and the more pressing the issue feels, perhaps the more likely [you] are to mobilize the streets for it,” Wilson said. “Probably the single most important mobilizing thing [is] imagery.”
Wilson’s work has exposed countless instances of police brutality at protests across the city. At the Rad pride demonstration this year, the Service de Police de la Ville de Montreal tear-gassed protesters; nearby, a family attending a salsa event was caught in the cloud. Wilson captured a photograph of the scene, showing a father clutching his infant, the baby’s tiny hand pressed against her eye, a five-year-old beside them frozen in fear. The photo spread rapidly across social media and quickly became a topic of conversation throughout the city.
Some commenters accused the family of negligence, claiming they should not have been near a protest, or that “children shouldn’t be out past nine.” William dismissed these deflections as obscene, but this kind of conversation in itself reveals the photograph’s power. Images don’t merely depict injustice but participate in its contestation. The circulation of that photo forced audiences to confront competing narratives about culpability, protection, and power. In doing so, it altered the long-held moral coordinates of public discourse: Who is seen as innocent, who is seen as dangerous, and who is meant to keep us safe.
Similarly, the representative from SPHR described how the group’s imagery, particularly on social media, has enabled it to reach thousands of students across the city, resulting in record-breaking student support for the Palestinian cause.
“We live in a visual world and images help us communicate our message more efficiently, whether that be an image of previous student protests which show the will and power of the student movement, or images of Palestine which remind people who we are fighting for when demanding divestment.”
The evidence is palpable: On Oct. 7, 2025, SPHR helped mobilize thousands of students and community members for a strike and rally across Montreal, demanding university divestment from industries complicit in the genocide of Palestinians.
Taken together, these examples make it hard to believe that theory alone could have moved so many people. To call art futile or self-indulgent is to confuse it with argument. Art does not reason—it reorients. And reorientation is where action begins.
Still, hesitation to speak of art amid suffering is understandable. It can feel almost perverse to speak of paintings and poetry while people endure material and bodily catastrophe—those in the midst of rape, occupation, or famine are not asking for performance art to make people empathize with them. And it is true that art, even when it mobilizes and exposes, can still fail to create the change we hope for. Yet, when all else fails, consider instead its most elemental power: Survival.
Discomfort is part of art’s purpose, especially in times of crisis. If art like Lady Gaga’s Swine performance makes us recoil, that reaction should remind us how fortunate we are to encounter pain only through art, not through our own bodies. It is easy to call a performance ‘too graphic’ when we are safe enough to experiment with its horrors only through representation. The least we can do to honour those who create art in times of suffering is to recognize their pain: Look, feel, and resist the privilege of detachment.
We might think of the children of the Terezín ghetto, awaiting deportation to Auschwitz. Their art was discovered hidden behind the walls of the barracks after the war. Among them was a poem by Hanus Hachenburg, which reads:
“I am a grown-up person now,
I have known fear.
[…]
But anyway, I still believe I only sleep today,
That I’ll wake up, a child again, and start to laugh and play.”
Hanus was killed in Auschwitz in 1944 at the age of 14.
Art may not have saved him, but if nothing else, it gave him a form of survival beyond the body. Maybe that’s why the children of Palestine t paint flowers and the children of the Terezín ghetto wrote poems about butterflies—because art offers them what reality no longer could: The hope of freedom, and perhaps the feeling of it.
