The Art of Terrorism

British artist Damien Hirst apologized yesterday for some careless remarks he made about the September 11 terrorists. Namely, he said they deserved "congratulating." This didn't go over very well.

In a video essay for BBC News Online last week, Hirst said the attack on the Trade Center was "visually stunning" and "kind of like an artwork in its own right."

Before getting all upset about this, though, perhaps it's worth reflecting on what he meant by that. Art, after all, is about making a statement and some kinds of art—political art in particular—requires a strong expression to generate the required impact on the viewer. By this token, terrorism does seem in some cases to have artistic elements in its execution. That doesn't make killing or injuring people "art," of course, but the mind of the political artist and the terrorist may at times cover similar ground with overlapping objectives. It's the parts that don't overlap that got Hirst in trouble, especially his crack about how "you've got to hand it to them on some level," which shows the sort of poor taste that informs many of his artistic creations, like that cow he cut in half and suspended in formaldehyde.

Another artist, this one an American, approached the subject a little differently but seems to have crossed a line that should have been respected. Eric Fischl designed and installed a statue titled "Tumbling Woman" that seeks to memorialize those who jumped to their deaths from the burning World Trade Center.

Shown at right, the piece "was abruptly draped in cloth and surrounded by a curtain wall on Wednesday." This is much more difficult to evaluate. Do we need to remember the victims best as they were in life, and are their deaths somehow exploited by the artist who chooses to focus on the moment and manner of their destruction? The Raven thinks so. The sum value of a human life is more than its final microsecond. By focusing on that instant, Fischl allows the September 11 killers to define the meaning of their victims' lives as being nothing but a prelude to their murder. The passers-by who complained about the statue and are resposible for its removal are in the right here.

"I don't think that it's done in bad taste," Christine Defonces said before the statue was covered. "It's an artist's reaction to what happened."

That's a valid point, but at the same time we don't desecrate the tomb-like nature of the Titanic and Andrea Doria shipwrecks, either. The concensus here is that the wrecks should be left as undisturbed as possible in respect to the dead who perished aboard them. The same thinking creates a moral wall about the September 11 victims that precludes attempts to exploit their deaths for value—whether commerical, political, or artistic.