If you were given a painting by Adolf Hitler, would you hang it on your wall or destroy it?
This pressing ethical question of our time is the premise of a new Channel 4 television programme in the UK. The channel has bought works by what it’s terming “problematic” artists, including Hitler, Pablo Picasso and Rolf Harris.
For each programme, host Jimmy Carr chairs a debate on whether an artwork can ever really be separated from its creator. At the end, the audience votes on whether Carr should destroy the work.
Apparently, some TV producer was given the brief, “make the Holocaust fun”, and this is what they came up with.
In a justly celebrated New Yorker essay, “Jane Austen and the Dream Factory”, the writer Martin Amis recounts how he was trapped in a north London cineplex, forced to watch the romantic comedy Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994). Shortly after the film begins, he tells us, “I was filled with a yearning to be doing something else (for example, standing at a bus stop in the rain), and under normal circumstances I would have walked out after 10 or 15 minutes.”
But these aren’t normal circumstances. The reason Amis can’t just walk out of the movie is that he is there with Salman Rushdie and the novelist’s bodyguards, so they are forced to stay for security reasons.
If you need reminding, after the publication of The Satanic Verses in 1988, Ayatollah Khomeini — the supreme leader of Iran — imposed a fatwa calling for Rushdie’s death, and the novelist was targeted for assassination.
Incredibly, the force of that fatwa has lasted. Over the years, many killings and bombings have been carried out by extremists claiming The Satanic Verses as motivation, and Rushdie was stabbed on a US lecture stage in August this year.
“Thus,” writes Amis, “the Ayatollah Khomeini had condemned me to sit through Four Weddings and a Funeral, and no Iranian torturer could have elicited a greater variety of winches and flinches, of pleadings and whimperings.”
When the movie is finally over, Amis writes, he said to Rushdie: “‘That was bottomlessly horrible. Why is it so popular?’ ‘Because’, said Salman, ‘the world has bad taste. Didn’t you know that?’”
The anecdote captures that confluence of populist fervour, religious mania (or its secular doppelgänger, moral outrage), and intellectual priggery that informs so much discourse around the arts.
The debate around what constitutes artistic worth shouldn’t be a matter of arbitrary, crowdsourced taste
— What it means:
Channel 4’s Jimmy Carr Destroys Art taps into this. If audience members decide an artwork should be destroyed because it was created by a problematic artist (their description), then it will be shredded, or “might be torched by a flame-thrower”.
In a statement to CNN, Channel 4 defended the show, calling it “a thoughtful and nuanced exploration of the limits of free expression in art, and whether work by morally despicable artists still deserves to be seen”.
But with flame-throwers, obvs.
Why on earth does Channel 4 think a random audience of stout British folk are qualified to decide what art should or shouldn’t exist? This isn’t putting the fox in charge of the henhouse, it’s putting the idiot rubber chicken in charge.
The 24-year-old who tried to kill Rushdie in August told the media he had read only two pages of The Satanic Verses. That’s the level of insight sufficient for life or death decisions, and in the case of Jimmy Carr Destroys Art, it’s the life of an artwork.
This is not to say these debates aren’t important, and that we shouldn’t be having them as often as necessary. The list of morally compromised artists is lengthy, and only the most blithely impervious critic would pretend the effect of great art is not, in some way, to wend the consumer of that art to the way of the artist. The salient question, perhaps, is whether we believe people are able to consciously grapple with this dynamic in the artwork.
However, the interrogation of these questions is perhaps not ideally served as part of an hour-long bit of entertainment designed to drive viewership and revenue.
At the unveiling of Jimmy Carr Destroys Art, the rubber chicken behind the programming, Ian Katz, said: “There’s no argument that it is significantly harder to cut through to a big audience these days ... The broadcast environment is completely different to what it was 40 years ago when there were two other state broadcasters and Channel 4 popped up on the scene.”
Note that the programme isn’t called Jimmy Carr Debates Ethics. Its very title screams exploitation. Let’s break shit!
Surely the debate around what constitutes artistic worth shouldn’t be a matter of arbitrary, crowdsourced taste? And while I’m fairly sure — with the emphasis on “fairly” — Channel 4 will include some actual practitioners in ethics, this doesn’t actually mitigate the risk.
I tried to discover how Channel 4 chooses its live audiences, but the closest I came was a list of shows you can apply to be part of, including Sex Rated, The Great British Bake Off, Help! We Bought A Village, NeverMets — Long Distance Love, Open House: The Great Sex Experiment, Extraordinary Extensions, and Naked Attraction.
This list does not fill me with optimism.
Channel 4 told CNN that “[Jimmy Carr Destroys Art] speaks directly to the current debate around cancel culture”.
I do find it amusing that ‘cancel culture’ has now become commodified by the very people who rail against it. That’s the power of capitalism for you
Many commentators have pointed out the irony of the choice of host. Here is the infamous joke he made in February: “When people talk about the Holocaust, they talk about the tragedy and horror of 6-million Jewish lives being lost to the Nazi war machine. But they never mention the thousands of Gypsies that were killed by the Nazis. No-one ever wants to talk about that, because no-one ever wants to talk about the positives.”
So much for cancel culture. Carr’s reward for that joke is that he gets to destroy other people’s art with the same glee with which he exploits genocide.
I do find it amusing that “cancel culture” (if such a thing even exists in the sense reactionaries define it, which I doubt) has now become commodified by the very people who rail against it. That’s the power of capitalism for you.
We do need to continually highlight the issue of whether we can separate the questionable, and in many cases illegal and evil, behaviour of artists from their artworks. A lot of the answer to that is going to depend on how much we trust people to be able to resist the insidious power of art, and to be able to turn art’s meaning towards their own ends.
Channel 4 has now updated the old cliché, “I don’t know much about art, but I know what I like”, to: “I don’t know much about art, but I know what I don’t like.” Or the even more scary, “I don’t know much about ethical philosophy, but I know what I feel.”
Ugh. We really don’t want to have the existence of artworks snuffed out based on the whims of what is essentially a game show audience, moderated by a gimcrack Ayatollah for the purposes of entertainment.
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