Miller: Transgressive Art Pacified

Characteristic of postmodernist art is transgression, the idea that the artist ought to produce works that violate traditional moral and aesthetic norms. The theory is that such norms are ultimately baseless, and thus violating them will liberate us from their tyranny and (the theory suddenly gets vague here) open up for us a new form of life that will somehow be better than that we have enjoyed in the past. This was never, in my view, a plausible program, and the utter predictability of much postmodern art, along with its complete failure to deliver any better form of life, suggests strongly that the program of transgression is a dead end. However that may be, transgression remains popular with artists themselves because it allows them to pretend to speak truth to power, to pose as courageous intellectuals exposing the pretensions and predations of the bourgeois power structure. Serious people always knew this was something of a joke. Postmodern artists exhibit in swanky galleries, party with rock stars and movie starlets, and¯inexplicably to my mind¯sell their works for tidy sums. All too often such artists are even on the public dole, accepting subsidies from the government of that bourgeois power structure they claim to subvert. But in all this, even if the postmodern artists could not plausibly claim to be demonstrating actual courage, they could still claim a counterfactual courage: They could say that they would transgress courageously the norms of a power structure that took them seriously enough to retaliate against them for their actions, provided only that they could find such a power structure to offend. Just give them a chance, and they would prove how brave they really are. That chance came last week for the Deutsche Oper in Berlin, which was about to mount Hans Neuenfels’ production of Mozart’s Idomeneo . In the original, Idomeneo appears in the last scene announcing peace. In Neuenfels’ version, Idomeneo makes this announcement carrying the severed heads of Poseidon, Christ, Buddha, and Muhammad. The deep, original, and very transgressive message is obvious: Destroy religion and there will be peace. For Christians, of course, this is a yawn; we hear the same thing on the radio every time John Lennon sings "Imagine." But it’s rather different, as the Deutsche Oper rightly concluded, for some Muslims. If you show Idomeneo severing the head of Muhammad, some Jihadists may well do the same for you¯for real, with a videotape released to Al Jazeera to prove it, unless, that is, they just don’t leave your bloody carcass on the street as they did with Theo van Gogh . Given a chance to transgress the norms of a power structure that fights back against transgressors, the artists at the Deutsche Oper folded immediately, thus demonstrating to the world what we knew all along, that postmodern artists are courageous only when in no real danger. Postmodern art can exist only in a tolerant, liberal society of the kind postmodernists affect to criticize but are actually parasitic upon. In one sense, I don’t blame the Deutsche Oper for canceling Neuenfels’ Idomeneo . After all, it’s a dreadful production, and surely its artistic value does not justify risking the violence that might result. But there is a principle at stake, too¯the principle that we in the West will not be intimidated as to what we say about Islam by threats from the Jihadists. Most people are never called upon to face physical danger for the sake of moral principle, and I do not judge harshly those who, when the summons comes, run away. But there is a certain justice¯even poetic justice¯in witnessing the hypocrisy of postmodern poseurs being exposed in such a public way. I recently argued in this space that Benedict XVI, in his speech at Regensburg, was implicitly challenging Muslims to engage in dialogue with the West on something like equal terms, accepting criticism with the same frankness with which they deal it out. The Muslim response to that challenge was largely angry and often violent. We now see in Berlin that the impresarios at the Deutsche Oper weren’t listening very closely, either, or, if they were, lacked the courage to respond.

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