Parenting & Family Quote by Norman Mailer

Mailer’s line lands like a dare: not a measured critique of Diane Arbus, but a performance of alarm. The simile does two things at once. It flatters Arbus’s power (a grenade changes a room instantly) while suggesting that power is reckless, even irresponsible. “Live grenade” is pure Mailer: macho, militarized, impatient with polite aesthetic talk. It frames photography not as observation but as an act with casualties.

The real payload is in “child.” Mailer isn’t just calling Arbus dangerous; he’s calling her uncontrolled, maybe naive, maybe morally underdeveloped. That’s a gendered move as much as an artistic one: the woman artist as impulsive, fascinated by freaks, unable to grasp consequences. Arbus’s subjects - outsiders, the visibly different, the socially stigmatized - become the implied victims of her curiosity. The accusation isn’t that she lies, but that she looks too hard without the proper adult supervision of decorum.

Context matters: Arbus emerged when documentary and street photography carried an aura of truth-telling, and her work threatened that sanctimony. She didn’t offer uplift; she offered confrontation. Mailer, a novelist obsessed with dominance, spectacle, and transgression, recognized a rival kind of authorial force: the camera that can wound without ever raising its voice.

The line survives because it’s both critique and confession. It reveals a fear that Arbus’s art detonates the social contract - that simply showing what we’d rather not see counts as an attack.