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The End Of The Avant-Garde
A pair of ageing British artists win plaudits for a show calculated to offend Catholics: But would they insult Muslim sensibilities in the same way? The art world's avant garde, so dedicated to smashing bourgeois taboos, has finally met the one line it dare not cross.
Nick Cohen reported from Gilbert & George's "Sonofagod" exhibition in London for yesterday's Observer.
Based on the question "Was Jesus Heterosexual?", the British duo's show used their by-now-familiar complement of photos of faeces, semen, rude words and crucifixions (often all together) in "an assault on the laws and institutions of superstition and religious belief."
If you live outside Britain, you'd be forgiven if your reaction to the above was "still?" Two centuries after cleric-baiting became the stock in-trade of Europe's art avant garde, the British are still getting excited over a couple of self publicists? Well, yes, but as Cohen notes, times are changing very quickly. First, of course, is the obvious fact that Britain's bourgeoisie are, by and large, the dominant group among gallery-goers, and what was once conceived to horrify the bourgeois is now designed to delight them.
Other enterprising artists have added paedophilia and child murderers to their taboo-busting iconography: I suppose this makes Gilbert & George's obsession with blasphemy seem traditional and quaint.
What the gallery's brochure describes as a "rebellion" is nothing of the sort - it is, as Cohen rightly argues, "a smug affirmation of the cultural status quo."
Second, there's the matter of the Jyllands-Posten cartoons. Not one British newspaper printed the images:
"After the refusal of the entire British press to print innocuous Danish cartoons, the stench of death is in the air. It is now ridiculous and impossible to talk about a fearless disregard for easily offended sensibilities."
Would any British artist risk offending Islamic sensibilities? After all, insult Islam and you're breaking two taboos for the price of one. You get to insult "the laws and institutions of superstition and religious belief" once again, and you also get to break the taboo on insulting an ethnic or minority group.
It's not just any minority group: In its most extreme forms, in Afghanistan, Iran and among the Hizb ut-Tahrir fanatics of Gilbert & George's own patch in London's East End, Islam is infinitely more conservative and repressive than even the strictest catholic Cardinal. The artists describe their Sonofagod work as a response to the Pope's criticism of homosexuals. In Iran, young homosexuals are routinely hanged. In Afghanistan, they were stoned to death.
Why do Joseph Ratzinger's pronouncements draw such a fierce response, while the execution of gays in theocratic states is met with silence?
Surely fear of appearing racist hasn't stopped Gilbert, George and their followers insulting Muslims? Cohen notes that fear of being beheaded might be a better explanation for the art world's silence on Islam:
"The fear of being murdered is a perfectly rational one, but it is eating away at the cultural elite's myths...
"It can't go on as if nothing has happened because the contradictions between breaking some taboos but not others are becoming too glaring...
"You can't be a little bit free. If you are not willing to offend Islamists who may kill you, what excuse do you have for offending Catholics, the families of murdered children and British troops who won't?"
