A trigger warning on art? A daft idea – but a back-handed compliment | Jonathan Jones

Stephen Fry was wrong to criticise the use of trigger warnings. Great works of art, like those of Caravaggio, can be frightening, grotesque and extreme

Trigger warnings are a modern folktale, surely? The idea that a generation of students are demanding – in between marching against statues and banning Germaine Greer – to be warned about violent, sexual or otherwise threatening content in great works of art has, to someone who has not been on campus for years, a fictional quality.

When Stephen Fry caused offence this week with remarks about a victim culture that supposedly allows people to say “‘you can’t watch this play, you can’t watch Titus Andronicus, or you can’t read it in a Shakespeare class … because it’s got children being killed in it, it might trigger something when you were young that upset you once.” I was saying to myself, pull the other one. Just show me these colleges or theatres that would put a trigger warning on Titus Andronicus. It’s obviously all made up by free speech zealots who love to imagine an army of humourless freelance censors obsessed with closing down the mind.

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