Alex Rivera, the artist behind the LowDrone, explains his project as such:

LowDrone.com lets users remotely pilot the ‘LowDrone,’ a vehicle which melds the lowrider, a customized car outfitted with hydraulics that allow the car to ‘hop,’ with the functionality of the drone, an unmanned aerial vehicle equipped with surveillance cameras that has been an evolving weapon and tool of airborne surveillance for nearly a hundred years. Lowriders are a technology developed primarily by Latino youth in barrios across the southwest. Drones are a technology recently deployed along the U.S. / Mexico border. Through LowDrone.com, users control a customized lowrider – the ‘LowDrone’ – and ‘hop’ over one of the most surveilled spaces on the planet: the U.S./Mexico border between Tijuana and southern California.

I thought the concept sounded a little cheesy, but the footage itself is actually quite beautiful, and emphasizes the permeability of the border:

It’s also a reminder that we don’t only use drones to try to kill terrorists. We’re a long, long way from satisfactory norms that govern how we kill, how we watch, and how we let ourselves be watched from above.

Since the shooting at a midnight screening of The Dark Knight Rises in Aurora, Colorado, I’ve been thinking a lot about a seeming contradiction at the heart of what I write about. I don’t believe that video games and violent movies somehow program people to go out to commit terrible crimes, but I do think that mass culture contributes to our sense of what is normal, whether it’s something as depictions of hecklers almost every time we see a stand-up comedy set in movies or television or as significant as routinized uses of force by the police without moral condemnation and the setting of absurd standards for average bodies for both men and women.

One of the things that’s fascinating about the setting of those norms is that they can be accidental. My friends who are video game designers have discussed about the challenges of building characters who have bigger bodies without making them bigger in every way, such that they’d have to be abnormally tall in order to look heavier. Hero Complex talked to video game designer Chris Hecker about violence in video games, which he suggested is more a function of what designers feel confident doing than an inherent demand for violent gaming:

For me, the thing that’s different about games right now is that we tend to rely on violence as the main part of the meal, rather than as spice. This is mostly a historical artifact of our current point in time, because as game designers we know how to do interactive violence, but we don’t yet know how to do interactive versions of all the other emotions in the palette that the other more mature forms have available to them. I think this will change over time, as game designers learn how to use interactivity more effectively.

And then there’s a long meditation by Owen Gleibman in Entertainment Weekly about killers who are overly-identified with pop culture artifacts, and the way culture gets out of its creators hands as soon as fans start interpreting it:

What these commenters graphically illustrated, in their hyperbolic hate spew, is that it is now possible to “love” movies like the Dark Knight trilogy far too much, to love them in a way that is disconnected from the very humanity that the movies are making a plea for. Fanboy culture now risks turning into a kind of fundamentalism for fantasy geeks, with movies turned into an absolute: a reason for living that replaces living. That’s why it’s so threatening if even one critic doesn’t like the movie that you’ve been pining for, ruining its chances for a Rotten Tomatoes rating of 100% fresh, the magical evaluation that would mean that everyone likes it, and that you could therefore join that club safe in the knowledge that you, too, will be liked by everyone.

People who are looking for frameworks to justify their dark visions will manufacture them out of whatever material is available to them, just as Jared Lee Loughner spun fantasies about the value of American currency from fragments of information. I tend to think we can more productively call artistic creators to account more for the things their work helps normalize, the quiet damage it contributes to, than the dramatic things people people claim were inspired by art that is very far distant from them.

When I read over the weekend that Thomas Kinkaide had died at the age of 54, I immediately thought of Susan Orlean’s 2001 profile of the painter, who rejected critical opinion of his work as schmaltzy and sold his work as part of the extremely lucrative collectibles market. Orlean points out of Kinkaide’s life story, in which he grew up poor and fatherless, left a Christian school for a secular art school before having a powerful conversion experience that lead him to dedicate himself to optimism in art, “It’s as good a story as you could hope for,” she wrote, “if you want to make a point about perseverance and pulling yourself up by your bootstraps and appreciating life’s bounty; even the bad parts of the story are good, because it’s easier not to begrudge Kinkade his fortune when you are reminded that he was a poor kid who had to struggle, who rejected the smarty-pants liberal establishment to follow his heart, and who is proud of having earned his way into the ultimate American aristocracy of successful entrepreneurs.”

Lots of folks have jumped on the subsequent pieces about Kinkaide that suggested the real story was less than flattering, involving everything from sexual harassment, to defraudment of the franchisees who ran Kinkaide’s galleries, to public urination. While I think it’s fine to debunk the narrative, it’s also worth getting at precisely why that narrative, and Kinkaide’s paintings, were so compelling to so many people, especially if you get frustrated with what seems like the perpetual American default to simplistic popular culture when more complex and interesting alternatives are available. Orlean wrote:

“I created a system of marketing compatible with American art,” Kinkade said to me recently. “I believe in ‘aspire to’ art. I want my work to be available but not common. I want it to be a dignified component of everyday life. It’s good to dream about things. It’s like dreaming of owning a Rolex ~n instead, you dream about owning a seventy-five-thousand-dollar print.” In fact, a lot of limited- edition art is about dreaming; so many of the paintings portray wistful images of a noble and romantic past that never was, or the anti-intellectual innocence of fairies and animals, or mythical heroes who can never fail and never fade…

“I have this certain ability to have in my mind an image that means something to real people,” he said, sitting on a sofa across the room from the easels. “The No. 1 quote critics give me is ‘Thom, your work is irrelevant.’ Now, that’s a fascinating, fascinating comment. Yes, irrelevant to the little subculture, this microculture, of modern art. But here’s the point: My art is relevant because it’s relevant to ten million people. That makes me the most relevant artist in this culture, not the least. Because I’m relevant to real people.” He sat up and started to laugh. “I remember that quote, man! It was a great quote! It was ‘The Louvre is full of dead pictures by dead artists.’ And you know, that’s the dead art we don’t want anything to do with!” He laughed again and slapped his thighs. “We’re the art of life, man! We’re bringing the life back to art!”

Nostalgia is a powerful thing, whether it’s an old-fashioned fantasy of a multi-ethnic army coming to rescue us from the newfangled threat of giant robots, or the promise of escape to a non-existent bucolic paradise. When it comes to pop culture, the comfortable are deeply averse to being disturbed. It’s the rare pop culture engine that can get huge numbers of people voluntarily invested in something that will be profoundly disruptive. That’s not a reason to think less of people who like Thomas Kinkaide, or Two and a Half Men—just to think harder about how we can build those engines, and to recognize the magnitude of the challenge.

Over the past week or so, I’ve gotten more and more irritated by the indiscriminate use of the word “controversial” to describe art and pop culture. It’s a classic case of a word not meaning what the people who use it seem to mean. And in some cases, deploying it can be actively unhelpful in communicating to an audience what’s actually interesting or moving about a piece of art.

Take Compliance, one of my favorite feature films out of Sundance. The subject of the movie, the detention and sexual assault of a young fast-food restaurant worker named Becky, is undoubtedly uncomfortable viewing for some people. The first time it aired at the festival, some members of the audience by images of star Dreama Walker underdressed or nude and being mistreate (and in proof that being a rich progressive doesn’t make you classy, some creep decided to shout things about how hot Walker is in the midst of that discussion). But the subject matter of the movie isn’t actually controversial: nobody thinks that the things that happen to Becky should have happened, and the movie makes it clear that they’re awful. And the making of the movie itself doesn’t seem to be the source of the controversy. As director Craig Zobel told me, he worked with Walker both to make sure she felt she wasn’t being exploited as an actress, and to make sure she felt like the movie would be something audiences would walk away from having absorbed the messages that Zobel intended to send. There may be a controversy over whether artists should portray bad things happening to women at all, but our culture seems to have settled on an agreement that it’s generally fine as long as you’re not making snuff pornography. Compliance is challenging, uncomfortable, and deeply moving. It is not controversial.

The Los Angeles Times does a nice job of fisking another occurrence of the phenomenon, this time NPR describing the long-dead and long-canonized artist Jackson Pollock’s work as controversial. There are controversies adjacent to Pollock, of course: if a toddler does the same thing, but without intention, is it art? Is the painting authenticator Paul Biro claims to have verified as the work Pollockreal or part of a scheme by Biro to pass off fakes? But Pollock’s work itself is not the subject of a genuine controversy: describing it that way is just a way to gin up pageviews.

Or worse, alleging controversy where there is none is a way of indicating false equivalence in an attempt to avoid charges of bias. The claim of false equivalency is one of the biggest debates in journalism right now, the source of the debate over whether the New York Times should “fact-check” (probably the wrong term for it) politicians’ claims. But art, even more so than politics, is an arena where writers should feel comfortable making judgements and refusing to pretend there’s an equal debate, or a debate at all, where there isn’t. Labeling something controversial or treating it as dangerous when it’s merely challenging is a way of keeping people away from art rather than getting them to engage with it.