Which artist. Name one.
A quote would be good.
Is “challenging” the only role of art?
To my mind the idea that art has to be challenging is a contemporary idea that is more political that artistic.
Artist want to express themselves.
To put something down or create something that is a manifestation of what is inside of them. To create something fixed in time and space, ie made eternal, that manifests something real that is temporal.
Or, sometimes great art is done for a pay check.
Great art can even be done to “challenge” or shock, or for political reasons, but usually doing art for such a reason creates stilted non-lasting pseudo-art.
But épater la bourgeoisie or to challenge those exposed to a work of art is most decidedly not the purpose of art.
Zappa, Bosch, Escher, Nabokov, Stravinsky, Picasso... All the real artists want to challenge you, and themselves.
It can’t be the only role, because without something else to go with that role it can’t challenge. It still has to be good, and has to reflect some aspect of reality. But it has to reflect it in a way that makes you think.
Franz Kafka, in a letter to Oskar Pollak (1904): "Altogether, I think we ought to read only books that bite and sting us. If the book does not shake us awake like a blow to the skull, why bother reading it in the first place? So that it can make us happy, as you put it? Good God, we'd be just as happy if we had no books at all; books that make us happy we could, in a pinch, also write ourselves. What we need are books that hit us like a most painful misfortune, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, that make us feel as though we had been banished to the woods, far from any human presence, like a suicide. A book must be the ax for the frozen sea within us. That is what I believe."