Saturday, September 18, 2010
Burning the Koran as a Work of Art
Pastor Terry Jones' as yet unfulfilled proposal to burn the Koran (here) continues to ripple through the culture. Earlier this week there was Justice Breyer's comments that acts like Pastor Jones' burning of the Koran might not be constitutionally protected (see here) -- remarks which he subsequently amended (see here).
Then there is Brad Schaeffer's suggestion over at Big Hollywood (here) that all Pastor Jones need have done to guarantee his speech both constitutional protection and cultural acceptance (at least among certain elites) was to propose that his burning of the Koran was a work of art. After all, Andres Serrano's work "Piss Christ," the photograph of a crucifix submerged in a vat of urine, earned accolades from the artistic community and a showing at New York's Museum of Modern Art.
Plainly the reaction that Serrano's work received (as well as that given to Chris Olifi's work of the Virgin Mary surrounded by female genitalia and elephant dung, displayed at the Brooklyn Museum of Art) was very different from the reaction that Pastor Jones received. But what does this show? That speech in the form of artistic expression enjoys a higher degree of constitutional protection and cultural acceptance than speech in the form of a religious act directed at a competing faith? That it is culturally acceptable to engage in acts that offend Christians but unacceptable to engage in similar acts when Muslims are the target? Or does it reflect a prudential judgment by some not to tempt fate, not to stir the honets' nest in the post-9/11 world in which armies from the United States and other traditionally non-Muslim countries occupy or have a substantial presence in a host of Muslim countries? Is it then that the restrained reaction of Christians in the United States makes them ripe targets for the crudest form of ridicule by their own countrymen while the relatively intemperate response of some followers of Islam make speech that insults Islam out of bounds?
Mind you, I am in no way endorsing Pastor Jones' proposal. Far from it. I simply wish to explore the reasons behind these different reactons.
https://mirrorofjustice.blogs.com/mirrorofjustice/2010/09/burning-the-koran-as-a-work-of-art.html
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I suspect these questions are best addressed in light of some basic historical knowledge and political understanding, including the recent history of Muslims, especially in the Middle East, with regard to European colonization and imperialist encounters. This includes a keen grasp of the issues raised under the rubric of “Islam and modernity,” the historical and religious questions prompted by the Nahda in the nineteenth century, and the myriad reasons Muslims have created reform and renewal movements in the twentieth century. The role of the U.S. in aiding and abetting authoritarian regimes in the Middle East, the Iraq war and the war in Afghanistan, the support for the state of Israel at the expense of the Palestinian right to collective self-determination in the Occupied Territories (and the equal rights Arabs in the state of Israel), and the experience, for example, of discrimination by Muslim immigrants in France, these and other factors contribute to an incendiary religious and political climate fanned by the flames of hyper-technological mass media and communication tools. It is only within such terms that we can begin to discuss what gives “offense” to Muslims, terms of a different order of magnitude than those framed by what might give “offense” to Christians living lives of privilege and affluence in a capitalist democracy.
Proposals to “burn the Qur’ān,” for instance, become overdetermined with political and symbolic meaning for Muslims in some parts of the world, becoming a vehicle for canalizing existing conflicts and grievances. As Juan Cole wrote at his blog (Informed Comment) about the protests in Afghanistan, “News that the planned bonfire of the scripture had been called off did not reach the provinces in time to avert the rallies, which were sparked in part by Taliban pamphleteering against the US. But it seems clear to me in any case that the threat of Quran-burning by a few dozen kooks in the US is only a pretext for these demonstrations, which inevitably are actually about the grievances of Afghans under foreign military occupation. That is why the story of the plans for burning the Quran has brought people into the streets in Afghanistan to protest in impressive numbers (in contrast to most other parts of the Muslim world, where there were no similarly-sized rallies).” And these considerations are apart from and in addition to the widespread ignorance among non-Muslims as to precisely what the Qur’ān is and means for Muslims, a meaning not amenable to a facile comparison to the manner in which Christians view the icon of Christ on the Cross.
Furthermore, one should have some fundamental appreciation of the nature of post-modern art and aesthetics, including the parts played by aggressive commodification, the celebration of an ethic of transgression, the obsession with novelty, and the perverse preference for exhibitionism (thus art as the ‘highbrow’ expression of vulgar entertainment and the virtual disappearance of what used to be called ‘high art’). In short and generally speaking (thus keeping in mind that there are always—some important—exceptions to our generalizations), post-modern art might best be described with Donald Kuspit as “anti-aesthetic” and “entropic” in character, relentlessly subject to a ubiquitous process of cultural transvaluation that “elevates the banal over the enigmatic, the scatological over the sacred, cleverness over creativity.”
Freud was rather prescient with regard to the nature of contemporary art when he claimed, as summarized here by Iris Murdoch, “that art is the fantasy life of the artist stimulating the fantasy life of the client,” and that while “we would normally be repelled by the private fantasies of another person…the artist persuades us to accept his by disguising them cleverly….” In Murdoch’s words, “It begins to look as if, where the art object is a mechanical stimulus to personal fantasy, pornography is the end point. All art aspires to the condition of pornography? It may be true at least that more does than meets the eye.” And I think Kuspit would concur with Murdoch’s conclusion that “Art (on such a view of it) is not the imaginative creation of unified public objects or limited wholes for edifying contemplation, with mystical analogies; it is the egotistically motivated production of maimed pseudo-objects which are licenses for the private concluding processes of personal fantasy.” Indeed, consider Kuspit’s remark that “Art is no longer fine art, that is, the expression and mediation of aesthetic experience…but rather a psychosocial construction defined by its institutional identity, entertainment value, and commercial panache.” This is the logical culmination of Duchamp’s willful indifference to the aesthetic, symptomatic of a constitutional “inability to imagine beauty,” especially insofar as beauty is related, Platonic-like, to truth and “the Good.” Serrano’s “Piss Christ” thus becomes yet another instance of “the resentment and repudiation of beauty” and the reduction of art to a medium of ideological expression or crude social criticism.
I believe, therefore, that we should be wary of drawing any comparative analogies or implications about, say, constitutional protection or cultural acceptance from these two fairly disparate cases, that we should refrain, in other words, from concluding anything along the lines that “speech in the form of artistic expression enjoys a higher degree of constitutional protection and cultural acceptance than speech in the form of a religious act directed at a competing faith,” or that “it is culturally acceptable to engage in acts that offend Christians but unacceptable to engage in similar acts when Muslims are the target,” or “that the restrained reaction of Christians in the United States makes them ripe targets for the crudest form of ridicule by their own countrymen while the relatively intemperate response of some followers of Islam make speech that insults Islam out of bounds.” Comparative assessments and judgments of this sort would seem at minimum to require more and varied items in the respective sets, items marked with more than superficial resemblance, and a sophisticated appreciation of the different historical, religious and political materials (variables) that frame our sets.