I initially had a really hard time putting how I felt about Jordan Wolfson’s VR piece at first. It wasn’t just the gratuitous violence, though that was certainly a large part of my discomfort. The more I sat with the idea of the piece, I realized it was that I perceived the artist as being irresponsible.
It felt like the artist was creating work that didn’t serve a purpose other than to shock the viewer, or perhaps for the artist to show how “edgy” he was. It felt self-serving, shocking for the sake of being shocking.
Realizing that art is different for everyone, I believe art needs context to be understood. That whatever message the artist was trying to get across was lost in the execution.