An artist, if he’s unselfish and passionate, is always a living protest. Just to open his mouth is to protest: against conformism, against what is official, public, or national, what everyone else feels comfortable with, so the moment he opens his mouth, an artist is engaged, because opening his mouth is always scandalous.
“Obscenity is a zone of nothingness we have to cross without which beauty lacks the suspended, risked aspect that brings about our damnation. …If I contemplate the nothingness of obscenity independently of desire and so to speak on its own behalf, I only note the sensible, graspable sign of a limit at which being is confronted with lack. But in temptation, the outer nothingness appears as a reply to a yearning for communication. …Crude obscenity gnaws away at my existence, its excremental nature rubbing off on me — this nothingness carried by filth, this nothingness I should have expelled, this nothingness I should have distanced myself from — and I’m left defenseless and vulnerable, opening myself to it in an exhausting wound.”
Georges Bataille | On Nietzsche