They prefer feeling glad, not sad because they can't handle it. Perhaps also generally too in their life
Exactly yes. Rather than see it as an opportunity to grow and "become better" they prefer to be offended or to try and silence the artist.
As for the artist the way to deal with horrible things may be to create art.
Yes! Art is after all a form of communication. If we want to be all romantic about it, we can even go as far as claiming that the artist does not know how to communicate in words, instead, the artist communicates with his or her art. I think this can be all the more relevant with dance and performance art and Butoh. The video you shared in the previous post, the poem the artist voiced in some sense attests to this. Dancing to him is a way of expression, but it might also be seen as a response to the world or anything. I think we are about to write a theory of communicative art if we go deeper into this! š
one tends to forget that terrible things do happen all the time [...] if you all the time think about how cruel life is, it would drive you crazy [...] the archeologists digging our remains 500 or 5000 years from now, need to see our war plates.
Exactly. Well put! Art in this sense becomes less of communication in the strict sense (yes they can communicate over time like Goya might "communicate" with us), but it is rather "documentation" then. It serves as a warning that surpasses the mere "word". Words of warning from previous generations might warn us, but we do not always listen. Violent "gore" videos of war and disaster might scare us and we might look away or we might even become desensitized, but art is different. In art, we might produce "feelings" and "emotions" that stir the viewer in a certain way to "listen" and "look" differently than merely warning someone or shocking them. There are so many great examples of this, and most of these might be political art of our current times. Again, I hope I am making sense.