From the WSJ Opinion Archives
LEISURE & ARTS
Criticize, Don't Vandalize
Israel's ambassador to Sweden chose the wrong way to make a point.
"Snow White and the Madness of Truth" is an off-the-rack piece of installation art, as predictably repellent as it is unfailingly banal. It consists of a large pool filled with a red liquid meant to recall blood. In it floats a model sailboat called "Snow White." In place of a mainsail is a rectangular photograph of Hanadi Jaradat, the 29-year-old Palestinian lawyer who murdered 21 Israelis when she blew herself up in Haifa last October.
In the normal course of things, you would never have heard of "Snow White." It's just another bit of dreary left-wing "statement art": morally rebarbative, aesthetically nugatory, interesting only as a symptom of cultural decay. You can see yards of the stuff every day at any of the 23,872 places where challenging, border-testing, antibourgeois, avant-garde, cutting-edge art is shown.
It is likely, however, that you have heard of "Snow White," for reasons that illustrate the power of timing and placement.
"Snow White" was recently installed in the courtyard of the Stockholm Museum of National Antiquities. It is part of an exhibition called "Making Differences," which in turn is part of a coming international conference on genocide hosted by the Swedish government. The fact that the Swedish government would welcome such politically tendentious rubbish shows how far the sclerotic gestures of the adversary culture have taken over establishment taste.
We are often told that establishment taste is parochial, obtuse and unreceptive to novelty. Since "transgressive," morally decadent art is the establishment taste of today, the good Swedish bureaucrats overseeing the exhibition doubtless expected all who gazed upon "Snow White" to demonstrate their sophistication by confining their response to appreciation or at least silence.
What they didn't bargain for was Zvi Mazel, who as of this writing is still Israeli's ambassador to Sweden. At an opening last Friday, Mr. Mazel stumbled upon this homage to terrorism and started acting like Howard Dean after being informed that he lost a primary. According to one report, the ambassador "went berserk" when he saw the piece. "He pulled out the plugs and threw one of the spotlights into the fountain," reported Kristian Berg, director of the unfortunate museum.
I have a certain sympathy with Mr. Mazel. I believe works like "Snow White" are art largely by dint of definitional courtesy. Really, they are examples of propaganda masquerading as art. They poach on the prestige of art in order to have it both ways. Criticize the aesthetic vapidness and you get a lecture about how the artwork transcends the traditional artistic categories to interrogate the oppressive political structures of the status quo, blah, blah, blah. Criticize the moronic politics and you get a sermon about not reducing works of art to a simplistic set of objective declarations.
For some time now, we in the West have acted as if to call something art is to exclude it entirely from moral scrutiny. Already in the mid-1940s, in an essay about Salvador Dalí, George Orwell observed that in many quarters there existed an unspoken assumption that "the artist is to be exempt from the moral laws that are binding on ordinary people. Just pronounce the magic word 'Art,' and everything is O.K. Rotting corpses with snails crawling over them are O.K.; kicking little girls in the head is O.K.; even a film like L'Age d'Or [which shows among other things detailed shots of a woman defecating] is O.K."
Of course, it isn't really OK. But was Mr. Mazel's response justified? I think not. His outrage at "Snow White" was understandable, even exemplary, but he should not have destroyed or defaced the exhibition. There were many steps open to him short of violence. To vandalize an art work--even a bad art work, even a morally reprehensible art work--is to adopt the tactics of the enemies of culture. When politically correct students are confronted with a conservative publication they detest, they conspire to round up all the copies and destroy them. That is a recipe for cultural tyranny. "Snow White" is assuredly a despicable work. But Mr. Mazel would have been far more effective had he channeled his ire into criticism instead of vigilantism.
Mr. Kimball is managing editor of The New Criterion.
