Provocative

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Art that shocks is not a modern invention. The nudes of Michelangelo's Last Judgment (1536–41) in the Sistine Chapel offended churchmen, and after his death Daniele da Volterra painted drapery over many of them. Caravaggio's Death of the Virgin (1601–06) was turned down by the church that ordered it, reportedly because the Virgin looked too much like an ordinary dead woman. In 1912 Egon Schiele spent more than three weeks in custody over his drawings, one of which a judge burned in court.

In the 1960s and 1970s provocation often became the work itself. Piero Manzoni sealed and labelled small tins as Artist's Shit (1961), and Chris Burden had a friend shoot him in the arm for Shoot (1971). Maurizio Cattelan's La Nona Ora (1999) shows Pope John Paul II felled by a meteorite, and Tracey Emin's My Bed (1998) put her own rumpled bed and its debris on view.