If you're really good, then you can turn morally-charged debates into fun explorations by asking funny questions. For example, basketball was invented by a white man. That means "black people playing basketball" is cultural appropriation. Ramen was originally a Chinese dish. They didn't even change the name. "Ramen" is just what you get when you pronounce the Chinese word "lamien" with a Japanese accent. Down with Japanese appropriation! (This is another joke.)
This works because you don't tell the person what to think, or even that they're wrong. You just let them tie themselves into knots.
If you can answer "is this representation harmful", you can answer "is this unnecessary shock value".
That's one direction to go. I prefer to ask "Is this representation true?" and just let the silence echo.
Winning a conversation feels like dropping a Moltov cocktail and walking away, right?
Discussing art is fun. It's a great pastime. There's a number of very simple art criticism questions we will never answer but are often very fun to discuss for specific artists or performers we care about. AI-assisted, some are:
There are a few morally charged, less fun debates. Such as:
It's worth pausing to notice the charged arguments reduce from the non-charged arguments.
This would suggest your ability to solve, make progress or produce new insight on these morally charged art questions are upper bounded at your ability to do so on the general art criticism questions. I do recommend having fun, endless debates about art. If you're in an endless, morally charged debate, try focusing on the "intrinsically endless" portion of the debate. For instance:
What you really don't want to do is mull over your new ideas on originality when simultaneously in a heated argument about what is and is not appropriative.
This post was inspired by a five-hour car debate over whether Korean rapper Jeon Soyeon's 2023 Facebook post mentioning that she had auditioned for Cube Entertainment in 2018 using Nicki Minaj's "Monster" constitutes sufficient historical attribution given her subsequent career trajectory and vocal style which other car ride members argue sound "exactly like just a Korean version of" Nicki Minaj, although the criticism may be unfair because the shared mixtape through that point of the trip was rap-focused and therefore Soyeon's alt-rock influenced songwriting for Korean girl group sensation (G)I-DLE was not included even though that's where she most differentiates herself from Minaj.