Art as Subversion

In 2021, Franco Zeffirelli’s 1987 production of Puccini’s opera Turandot came under criticism from the New York Times critic Anthony Tommasini. According to Heather MacDonald, writing in the City Journal (October 15, 2021), “Tommasini issues a reprieve to the music itself, but the ‘increasingly anachronistic’ production must go, he says, since it fails to dispel what he sees as the story’s racist stereotypes, especially regarding the three ministers Ping, Pang, and Pong. Cue up the new and improved anti-colonialist Turandot!”¹ Apparently, this particular production of Turandot needs to be abandoned for the usual inane reasons peddled by the cancel culture brigade. However, as usual, things are not what they appear to be on the surface, and certainly not what they are claimed to be. There is a deeper agenda underpinning this and other attempts to cancel Western art.

The creative arts are part of a core group of disciplines that lead the way in any religious, philosophical, cultural, and significant political change. I think they are almost always part of the avant-garde in the transformation of a civilization’s worldview and therefore of the civilization itself. The arts reach the new goal well ahead of the general population, who at first are confused and bemused by the new art, but eventually they start to catch up—that is, they start getting converted to the new religion and begin to accept all its cultural expressions. But this takes time. In the meantime, what the new artists, philosophers, and culture shapers are up to seems like madness to many. But it is not madness if it is seen in terms of its own presuppositions, its own fundamental religious foundations. This is the only way to understand what is going on in the arts today. Of course, those foundations themselves may be wrong, but the only way to get at this is by means of a transcendental critique of the worldviews in question, and that is not something you are going to find in a media essay on the arts, let alone in a review of an opera, which is on the rarefied end of the arts spectrum.

To cut a long story short, it is not merely Zeffirelli’s production of Turandot that is the target—and that in the minds of the apostles of the new culture, the new religion, must go—but ultimately Turandot itself, and indeed the whole of Western classical music and art, and much more: the whole of Western civilization. This means that the worldview on which it is based must be attacked and abolished, and this is fundamentally a religious war. But of course, the battle has to start somewhere, so why not Zeffirelli’s production of Turandot? That is going to be easier than attacking the music head-on, and the latter will come in due time when more initial ground has been taken. This is all part of the tactics—or should that be strategy? I always get them mixed up. Western classical music and Western art are fundamentally tied to Western culture, and culture is religion externalized; it is the product of a civilization’s religious worldview. And that is why it must all go in the eyes of the apostles of the new religion. I am not proposing some conspiracy theory here. The truth is rather more prosaic and yet in reality certainly more problematic than the existence of any conspiracy, and it is this: the logic of an idea, once it has gained a foothold in the human psyche, has a tendency to work itself out with a relentless consistency to its ultimate conclusions, even among men of disparate cultures who have little or no contact with or knowledge of each other—and for the vast majority of people this happens quite subliminally, unless it is effectively challenged. And it is this working out of an ideology—a religion, really—that is held self-consciously by the elite of the avant-garde, but that is still being worked out subliminally in the wider culture, that we are seeing.

This has been going on for a long time—in music and the arts for more than a century—but we have now reached the exponential part of the curve. Expect much more. Without a renaissance of the Christian faith, it will not stop until the whole of Western culture has been demolished and forbidden as subversive, because that is what it is to the new religion of the brave new world: subversion, just as the new art is subversive to the old religion. Art and religion are inseparable, just as politics and religion are inseparable. In fact, the whole of life is inseparable from religion.

Of course, the apostles of the brave new world are desperate to believe that religion does not matter and that modern man has outgrown religion. They are wrong on both counts: religion is the foundation of all human life and always will be, and this fact will come back to bite them. In fact, we are already seeing this, and this frenzy of anti-art and anti-culture masquerading as the avant-garde may perhaps turn out to be the rabid thrashing of an animal that knows it is cornered and facing the kill. I certainly hope so.

Citations

¹ Heather Mac Donald, “Taboo Alert at the Met,” City Journal, October 15, 2021, https://www.city-journal.org/article/taboo-alert-at-the-met-update. ↩