by Scott Birch

Created on: October 28, 2008

To truly understand the full extent of who Brian Warner is, we must first have a conversation about art.

The role of the artist is to relay questions to the world, to hold up a mirror to the scarred face of humanity and make it think long and hard about it's actions. This is why it makes me uncomfortable when the word "artist" is used too loosely, but I can say with solid confidence that Brian Warner, Marilyn Manson, is one of the most important living artists in the world.

Can you remember the last time that you were appalled and rendered completely speechless by an event that you either witnessed or heard about? Try to put yourself in that spot again. Feel what you felt in that moment. Recall how your mind raced to try to compute what your eyes and ears just registered.

Your feeling in that moment is what every important artist in the world is trying to duplicate. They don't want to shock you; the profound artist Gottfried Helnwein once told an interviewer "Shock is a useless affect. A person in shock is completely useless. I want to make people think." The aim of the extreme images and music is to shake people from their convenient and untouched belief systems by shattering the taboos that we as a society have built up to avoid the uncomfortable, but nonetheless important questions that demand our attention.

Hang a canvas of a sunset in a gallery and people will walk up to it, smile, then walk away. Replace that painting with an image of a bleeding young girl or a celebrity convulsing in their own vomit and the reaction will shift as abruptly as it does dramatically.

People might hate it. They might love it. An elderly man might approach it and stare with a stone face. Squinting his eyes and leaving his hands resting limply in his pants pockets as his palms begin to sweat. He takes in every detail. A young woman might crouch down at the foot of the canvas, her hand meekly fumbling with her lips as her eyes glaze over.

The reactions will vary from person to person, but undoubtedly it will cause each individual to contemplate something in their lives. They will all take something away from their moment in front of that grotesque image, possibly a nightmare or maybe a grain of inspiration. If there is even a single person who was not emotionally touched in some way by what they saw, then the artist hasn't done his or her job correctly and the wall might as well be blank.

As a child growing up in a fundamentalist Christian school in Canton, Ohio, Brian Warner

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