The art of politics, the art of war

"What happened there is—they all have to rearrange their brains now—is the greatest work of art ever. That characters can bring about in one act what we in music cannot dream of, that people practice madly for 10 years, completely fanatically, for a concert, and then die. That is the greatest work of art for the whole cosmos."

Those words, attributed to avant-garde composer Karlheinz Stockhausen by the Associated Press on Tues., Sept. 18, may constitute a grievous misquote. Stockhausen says as much, claiming that the quote's "ever" was really "by Lucifer."

But the power those words wield! The power to cancel two Hamburg concerts, the power to bring an obscure experimentalist into the international limelight. Why? Because they compare horrific hate and violence to art. To art! The comparison trivializes what happened and simultaneously exalts it. Why?

Invert the question. What if an artwork were declared hateful and violent? Some, surely, would protest or boycott. But most others would laugh, or even frown at the declarer: art is just art, after all, and equating it with emotion and action—with the real world—nomatter how offensive the piece, is so much high-flown rhetoric, insulting to victims of real violence and hate and flattering to vulgar self-styled artistes.

Art is art, no more and no less. So Kant might say: the beautiful provides a disinterested satisfaction. It is not "real." Art is art, so it seems.

Falsely. Because today's art, pop and underground, gangsta and new-age, is inevitably politics as well. When we say this art affects us, we don't mean disinterestedly. We are interested in and scared of the real things art provides: the now-scary spectacle of Independence Day, the emotional uplift of celebrities paying tribute to heroes on national television, the deconstructed new world order promised by '60s happenings, the economic boon of tourists visiting New York's Broadway, the painful memories the Clear Channel list tried to evade. There is little beauty here. Nor is Kant's idea of sublimity—the infinity that terrifies and pleases from afar—sufficient, even if big-budget blockbusters do have a kind of sublimity in their scale. For art's effect is real, not just aesthetic—and that realness is political. Art is just art no longer.

Surely the tragic loss of life on Sept. 11 played the greatest part in our collective trauma. But the World Trade Center and Pentagon—can anyone deny that the destruction of the buildings themselves was crucial? Because besides being grand architecture, they were to an extent grand art. Because grand art cannot help but implicate itself in real-world symbolism—the Twin Towers, symbols of economic might, the Pentagon of military.

JASON KIRK/GETTY IMAGES

The words attributed to Stockhausen offend us because they are true. When America was attacked, it was an aesthetic attack as well as a political one—an act born out of aesthetic politics, on politic aesthetics. Walter Benjamin once called fascism aestheticized politics, Marxism politicized aesthetics.

We live in an irretrievably imagistic culture: it would be impossible to proscribe art that involves itself in politics, and horrid to do so at the behest of offended terrorists. War—a beautiful, simple word, disarming in its implication of moral certainty and certain victory—is the political action most in danger of corruption through aestheticization. If we choose war (and we have), we should choose war as politics.

We should eschew war as art, as aesthetically pleasing retribution, as total destruction of an enemy that's somehow turned into a work of art itself—the Enemy. They are in no way a work of art. They are only men, evil men. For men, we have politics. Sam Frank, MC '02, is a senior editor of the Herald.

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