Two kinds of censorship limit the rights of artists to express themselves. One is censorship from above: the naked power of the state to ban a book, a play, a film or an exhibition. The other is censorship from below: the ability of vocal civic groups to put pressure on publishers, venues and organisations to hold their tongues.
To risk a sweeping generalisation, the first kind of censorship has diminished greatly in the democratic West, but the second is on the rise. Some of it comes from religious groups – notably Islamist – that don’t believe in free artistic expression or, indeed, in the nexus of liberal values. But the more insidious kind comes from groups that turn those very liberal values against themselves, turning one liberal value, respect, against another, artistic freedom. It is this kind of censorship that may, right now, be the most dangerous. Two recent examples from major artistic centres in New York and London show why.
The first case is that of the revival by the Metropolitan Opera in New York of John Adams's The Death of Klinghoffer. First staged in 1991, it deals with the hijacking of the cruise ship Achille Lauro six years earlier, during which members of the Palestine Liberation Front murdered an elderly and wheelchair-bound Jewish- American businessman, Leon Klinghoffer. The crime was undoubtedly anti-Semitic: Klinghoffer was killed because he was a Jew. So the opera deals with a difficult subject and has been controversial from the beginning. Rather bizarrely, in the wake of the attacks on the US of September 11th, 2001, Boston Symphony Orchestra even abandoned plans to play excerpts from the score, as if the very music itself would be an insult to the dead.
The Met is staging The Death of Klinghoffer for eight performances this month, beginning on October 20th. But when it announced the opera as part of its autumn season, last June, there was a barrage of hysterical criticism from right-wing media and from the Anti-Defamation League, which campaigns against perceived anti-Semitism. Almost immediately, the general manager of the Met, Peter Gelb, announced that, although the staging of the opera would go ahead as planned, it would not be broadcast as part of the wonderful Live in HD series, which allows audiences around the world to see productions in cinemas. The protesters pocketed this instant victory and carried on: there have already been physical protests outside the Met, and there are plans for larger demonstrations demanding, literally, that the show must not go on.
Gelb's decision to abandon the simulcast was insane on two counts. Hysterical censors don't back off when you throw them a bone; it simply whets their appetite for flesh. And artistic leaders have to back their own judgments completely. Either The Death of Klinghoffer is anti-Semitic propaganda or it isn't. If it is, don't stage it. If it's not, stand over your artistic right to explore difficult questions. The opera features a vile anti-Semitic character – how could it not? – but confusing the views of a character with those of the writer is merely ignorant. Once you start compromising with this kind of ignorance, you're lost.
An even more worrying episode is the decision by the Barbican Art Gallery in London to shut down Brett Bailey's installation Exhibit B. Not having seen the show, I rely on the gallery's own description: "Exhibit B critiques the 'human zoos' and ethnographic displays that showed Africans as objects of scientific curiosity through the 19th and early 20th centuries." The installation featured 12 tableaux of "motionless performers placed in settings drawn from real life". The intention was to "confront colonial atrocities committed in Africa, European notions of racial supremacy and the plight of immigrants today".
What’s wrong with this? The performers, all of them black Britons, believed themselves to be involved in an anti-racist work. In a statement, they said: “We find this piece to be a powerful tool in the fight against racism. Individually, we chose to do this piece because art impacts people on a deeper emotional level that can spark change. The exhibit does not allow for any member of the audience, white, black or otherwise, to disassociate themselves from a system that contains racism within it.”
But a group of around 200 protesters, backed by an online petition signed by 20,000 people, decided otherwise. A large plank of their protest was that the creator of the piece, Brett Bailey, is white and, moreover, grew up in South Africa. There may be well be legitimate arguments about Exhibit B, but this is a terrible one: a lot of Nadine Gordimer's novels should have been banned on the same grounds. In any case, people did not get a chance to engage in these arguments – after the first protest, the Barbican caved in and closed the show.
In both of these cases, we see an absurdity: the liberal fear of being called illiberal leads to the ultimate illiberal reaction of self-censorship. Artists have to stand up for their right to explore difficult questions, including racism and anti-Semitism, without being accused of holding the views they are exploring. Sometimes it’s okay not to be accommodating, especially when it means caving in to people who simply don’t know what art is. fotoole@irishtimes.com
