307x307px|Laocoön and His Sons is one of the most famous of ancient sculptures. It shows Trojan priest Laocoön and his sons Antiphantes and Thymbraeus being attacked by sea serpents. The depiction of violence in high culture art has been the subject of considerable controversy and debate for centuries. In Western art, graphic depictions of the Passion of Christ have long been portrayed, as have a wide range of depictions of warfare by later painters and graphic artists. Theater and, in modern times, cinema have often featured battles and violent crimes , while images and descriptions of violence have always been a part of literature. Margaret Bruder  states that the aestheticization of violence in film is the depiction of violence in a "stylistically excessive", "significant and sustained way" in which audience members are able to connect references from the "play of images and signs" to artworks, genre conventions, cultural symbols, or concepts . 18th century – present In the mid-18th century, Giovanni Battista Piranesi, an Italian etcher, archaeologist  and architect active from 1740, did imaginary etchings of prisons that depicted people "stretched on racks or trapped like rats in maze-like dungeons", an "aestheticization of violence and suffering". In high culture High culture forms such as fine art and literature have aestheticized violence into a form of autonomous art. In his 1991 study of romantic literature, University of Georgia literature professor Joel Black stated that "(if) any human act evokes the aesthetic experience of the sublime, certainly it is the act of murder". Black notes that "...if murder can be experienced aesthetically, the murderer can in turn be regarded as a kind of artist—a performance artist or anti-artist whose specialty is not creation but destruction"
307x307px|Laocoön and His Sons is one of the most famous of ancient sculptures. It shows Trojan priest Laocoön and his sons Antiphantes and Thymbraeus being attacked by sea serpents. The depiction of violence in high culture art has been the subject of considerable controversy and debate for centuries. In Western art, graphic depictions of the Passion of Christ have long been portrayed, as have a wide range of depictions of warfare by later painters and graphic artists. Theater and, in modern times, cinema have often featured battles and violent crimes . Similarly, images and descriptions of violence have historically been significant features in literature. Margaret Bruder , a film studies professor at Indiana University, states that the aestheticization of violence in film is the depiction of violence in a "stylistically excessive", "significant and sustained way" . Aestheticized violence differs from gratuitous violence in that it is used as a stylistic element, and through the "play of images and signs" references artworks, genre conventions, cultural symbols, or concepts 18th century – present In the mid-18th century, Giovanni Battista Piranesi, an Italian etcher, archaeologist , and architect active from 1740, did imaginary etchings of prisons that depicted people "stretched on racks or trapped like rats in maze-like dungeons", an "aestheticization of violence and suffering". In high culture High culture forms such as fine art and literature have aestheticized violence into a form of autonomous art. In his 1991 study of romantic literature, University of Georgia literature professor Joel Black stated that "(if) any human act evokes the aesthetic experience of the sublime, certainly it is the act of murder". Black notes that "...if murder can be experienced aesthetically, the murderer can in turn be regarded as a kind of artist—a performance artist or anti-artist whose specialty is not creation but destruction"
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