Though books of criticism don't normally break through to mass audiences, there are certain tomes, like John Berger's Ways of Seeing or Susan Sontag's On Photography, that have managed to seep into public consciousness. It's clear that The Art of Cruelty intends to be this kind of book. In between her serious blocks of research, Nelson pauses to synthesize, inject humor and often speak directly to the reader as if he or she were part of a fiery conversation over dinner rather than an anonymous page turner. Her one-liners are sparkling ... The Art of Cruelty is not a book for the squeamish or even the passive reader. It will upset and confuse, and even delight at times. It's a lean-forward experience, and in its most transcendent moments, reading it can feel like having the best conversation of your life. It's not an easy text to dive into, but once begun it's difficult to ignore.

Maggie Nelson has her laments about violent representations, but in The Art of Cruelty she refreshingly aims them largely up the cultural ladder, at the fine arts, literature, theater — even poetry ... This is an important and frequently surprising book. By reframing the history of the avant-garde in terms of cruelty, and contesting the smugness and didacticism of artist-clinicians like the notorious Viennese Actionist Hermann Nitsch and other heirs of Sade and Artaud, Nelson is taking on modernism’s (and postmodernism’s) most cherished tenets ... Nelson’s opinions can be quirky and hard to square with one another, but they never fail to be interesting, quite some accomplishment in what could have been a free-form ramble through the mires of someone else’s aesthetic preoccupations ... Hopping like a jackrabbit between genres and media, including forays into the swamps of pop culture, Nelson is strongest when at her most rageful, writing with controlled fury at the anti-­intellectualism and crassness of the present ... Occasionally I felt an urge to protest these rather balletic leaps, but Nelson, who is also a poet, is such a graceful writer that I finally just sat back and enjoyed the show.

Her open-mindedness toward questions of catharsis and its demands is what makes her book so fascinating. Her inability to offer anything like consistent answers to the questions she poses is what makes it so frustrating ... Nelson’s aim is to encourage her readers to suspend, at least for a few moments, whatever repulsion they may feel toward depictions of cruelty and toward artists who use them to explore the human capacity for cruelty, in order to appreciate the efforts to lead us into unfamiliar territory. But since emotions and perceptions vary so much from one person to another, her approach is inevitably highly subjective. Though Nelson occasionally ventures into theory, The Art of Cruelty is best read as a record of one person’s reactions to an impressive number of exposures to works of art, both familiar and esoteric. And in the end, perhaps an idiosyncratically personal account reveals the inescapable contradictions and tensions in the enterprise better than any tidy analysis could.

Nelson weaves low culture and high culture together conversationally, so that Stephen Colbert and Bacon can appear in the same paragraph ... Divided into short, thematic chapters — on imprisonment and captivity, for example — the book dives right into discussions of successful (and less successful) artistic works that hinge on cruelty. And then it swiftly problematizes these discussions by adding contradictory thinkers and counter-examples, a clear rhetorical strategy ... Nelson brings her deepest critical faculties to bear on performance art or art that is performed and filmed ... This is criticism at its best: evocative, plainspoken, with an unwavering point of view. As Nelson darts from artwork to artwork, using the lens of cruelty to shine her own particular light, there is a joy in both her conviction and her questions ... The pleasures of The Art of Cruelty may be somewhat diminished by its looseness, by Nelson’s reluctance to provide the continuity and connection a critic can. Nonetheless, it is a vibrant and engaged work, from a writer and thinker who is worthy of our attention.

It’s a brave yet difficult undertaking, difficult because this is a tough treatise to like. Not only is the subject matter enervating—I often put the book down, worn out by the constant knife edge of violent images—but I struggle with Nelson’s ambivalence as the end-all of her enthrallment. She offers only occasional judgments, no consensus, no classification. Sadly, the absence of any structured groundwork or conclusions about many aesthetic and cultural questions feels like a missed opportunity ... Though I understand Nelson’s style of exemplification—let the pieces and their horror speak for themselves—I was left with no broader understanding. Most of all I wanted her to pull back and provide some pragmatic analysis. What are the consequences of such violence in art, not just in her but in the culture? ... By the book’s end, I sensed a trade-off: I was more aware of this art’s disturbing purposefulness and less willing to sit with its pummeling whether by the artist or the critic. Which may be the (double) value of her book. An education in, and a flight from, distaste.

...an earnest but scattershot book ... What we want is more of Nelson’s blunt commentary ... Her generalizations can ring so true that they’re like hearing your own half-realized truths in someone else’s mouth ... But this quality of thought is too frequently concealed behind an impermeable, marmoreal style of academic theory. This voice does not come naturally to Nelson, but she adopts it nonetheless to quell a suspicion about beautifully made arguments—namely, that it is hard to know when they are false. So she chooses—to her detriment—rococo sentence constructions ... She is at her best when she allows herself to linger. When she meditates on how, for example, Mendieta’s obsessions intersect with her politics or the torsion in the artist-viewer relationship. Nelson is so strong on this last point—pondering how artists of cruelty hold our attention even as they strive to offend and terrify us—that it’s a pity she chooses not to engage the reader more in her own book, to demand, as Mendieta does, our attention and complicity. She’s here to reckon with cruelty. We’re here to watch. But Nelson keeps the reader at bay.

The most forceful parts of Nelson’s book occur when she tells us 'what she read' in various works of art. She is unafraid to be politically incorrect, bewildered, confused, and contradictory as well as appalled, shaken, revolted, amused, and exultant; she therefore offers the reader the freedom to be these things, too ... Nelson’s suppleness and hermeneutical humility—her willingness to let us watch as she works out her ideas, rather than simply present us with fully-formed pronouncements—is too rarely found in contemporary critical writing, and so in reading The Art of Cruelty I often felt grateful to her ... Alas, such passages of insightful criticism are too rare. Much of The Art of Cruelty is a mess. Nelson has a weak narrative sense; she tends to begin her chapters in one place and end in a very different one, without ever tying together her disparate ideas ... The major problem, though, is that Nelson doesn’t really 'reckon' with the art of cruelty ... In too many places Nelson contradicts herself in ways that do not suggest complexity or nuance, but simply a muddle ... The questions that Nelson raises about what it means for artists—and audiences—to delve into cruelty need to be addressed, thought about, discussed, debated. Nelson’s analyses often fall short, but she is right to reject easy, definitive answers.

The gory, brutal images that swamp modern culture are stupefying and dehumanizing —or maybe not, argues this richly ambivalent study ... This panorama provokes strong reactions in her, but no dogmas. Nelson rejects the modernist claim that brutality in art provokes cathartic reactions that shock us out of alienation and into social justice, but rejects also the notion that cruel art makes people cruel ... Nelson's erudition and wide fluency in artistic and philosophical traditions yield many subtle, insightful readings (her meditation on 'brutal honesty' is especially good). But her view of her lurid subject is sometimes too nuanced and unsatisfying.