STANLEY KUBRICK AND FRANCISCO GOYA

These two are among the greatest artistic masters across all genres and all media. Each is most concerned with the complexities of human minds and with the nature of morality. And both, with almost no exceptions, carry us to that complexity and morality by way of pure uncut horror.

Goya’s paintings (and particularly his prints) and Kubrick’s films are not paintings, prints or films; they are spiritual events. Both artists deliver a psychic bludgeoning so thorough that the recipient is left feeling complete desperation and fatigue, with no option left but to seek out grounding and goodness.

Fortunately, that grounding and goodness is offered to us—laced implicitly, carefully and subtly. We emerge from these events permanently altered. More awake. More alive. Another of history’s greatest artists who employs this same method, Franz Kafka, describes it perfectly: “Suffering is the positive element in this world, indeed it is the only link between this world and the positive.”