Good for Culture Minister Alessandro Giuli to take a stand against Russian conductor Valerij Gergiev’s performance at the Reggia di Caserta, and good for the European Commission to remind us that EU Culture Commissioner Glenn Micallef “has repeatedly said that European stages should not give space to artists who support the war of aggression in Ukraine.” I hope, therefore, that Gergiev’s performance will be cancelled: Governor Vincenzo De Luca has reminded us that the line of his administration, even in this case, is “that of dialogue,” but how is it possible to dialogue with a country, for three years now, continues to deny dialogue, and with those who believe that the only possible negotiation is one that recognizes the exclusive reasons of the aggressor? What kind of dialogue can open the presence of a conductor who has never uttered a word of condemnation regarding the violent and senseless aggression Ukraine has been suffering for three years?
It is not, of course, a matter of defending the freedom of art, not least because art is not neutral, much less is the artist, and it would moreover be idle to propose a long list of exceptional artists who have supported dictatorial or totalitarian regimes. Nor is it a matter of censoring Russian culture: we are not here at the grotesque paroxysm of the grotesque hypotheses of censorship on university courses dedicated to Dostoevsky, which also lingered in the minds of some in the aftermath of Russian aggression, and which were all the more senseless then, when many, including myself, believed that with Putin’s government there might still be room for dialogue or confrontation. This is not a censorship of Russian culture: it is not a matter of preventing people from reading, delving into, discussing and critically reasoning about a Russian writer or artist, an action that would take the form of an act of preventive censorship, as an obtuse attack on freedom of thought. It is a totally different matter: we are talking about a living and active individual, who uses his visibility to support, more or less explicitly and more or less tacitly, a regime that represses dissent, imprisons opponents (or silences them more or less permanently), nurtures mistrust of or less permanently), harbors nineteenth-century expansionist aims, and has subjected one of its neighbors to a violent war of aggression that continues to this day in brutal ways (we are all familiar with the constant bombardment to which civilians in Ukrainian cities from Kyiv on down are subjected). Jacques Maritain, in The Responsibility of the Artist, wrote that “totalitarian states have the power to impose the control of morality-their peculiar morality-on the mechanisms of the intellect, especially on art and poetry. Thus [...] creative activities are responsible to the state and subordinate to it; the artist and writer have a primary moral obligation to politics and must also conform to the aesthetic principles established by the state, which claims to express and protect the needs of the people. The state does not expel Homer: it tries to domesticate him.”
There can then be no ambiguity in giving space and voice to a public figure, alive and present, who has never distanced himself from the regime (anyone who wants to delve deeper into who Gergiev is and in what ways he colluded with the regime will find a lot of material on the Web in these hours: one could start, for example, with his English-language Wikipedia page or with an excellent article in Linkiesta that reveals all the shadowy areas behind his figure). Again Maritain sought to strike a balance between absolute permissiveness and authoritarian control, recognizing that freedom of expression is never absolute and that the limits that are imposed on freedom of expression can be justified on the basis of the common good, which is not merely public order or material well-being, but the full development of the faculties of the human being, which means that limitation must still take place with respect for certain values (truth and beauty, freedom of research, respect for intelligence), compromised of which limitations no longer become legitimate. However, this does not seem to us to be the case with any cancellation of a Gergiev performance.
After all, preventing a conductor so involved in the regime from performing is not the same as boycotting art. On the contrary, it would perhaps be more hypocritical and counterintuitive to have a conductor who supports an invading and homophobic regime conduct the performance of music by Giuseppe Verdi (one of the symbols of the Italian Risorgimento, a composer associated with a moment of struggle against a foreign ruler) and Tchaikovsky (a homosexual composer). And in favor of Gergiev’s performance one cannot even bring up the objection that, for example, our museums display works by artists who are anything but limpid, from the murderous Caravaggio to the whole sequence of painters, sculptors, and assorted architects who supported fascism to the end. The separation of art from person concerns at least two dimensions, namely historicization and actual political impact.
A Caravaggio or, let’s say, a Sironi, are now two widely historicized artists, and historicization allows one to observe a cultural phenomenon critically, establishing an appropriate distance from the facts, and making an appropriate contextualization. Not to mention that they can no longer speak for themselves. Exposing an artist with a biography that is not exactly intact or an artist who was colluded with the fascist regime is, in other words, a cultural act that can be done with a critical spirit, without celebrating the dark sides of the characters and, on the contrary, trying to contextualize them (Caravaggio with his biography and with the cultural climate of anera in which violence was a daily presence in anyone’s life, Sironi with the historical period he lived in, obviously recognizing that there were also artists who chose to stand on the other side of the Gothic line). Having Gergiev perform, on the other hand, is an act of public legitimacy, all the more so if in a festival sponsored by a public body of a democratic country founded on precise values that have been established in a Constitution. Freedom of expression does not automatically imply the right to grant public visibility, or even worse official visibility, to anyone, especially if that anyone supports a regime that systematically violates human rights, because this visibility that Gergiev is granted within thecontext of an institutional space (the Reggia di Caserta, moreover, is a museum run by the Ministry of Culture) may imply some form of recognition or legitimization towards an artist who supports a regime that the European Parliament has recognized as a sponsor of terrorism for the atrocities committed against the Ukrainian people. It is worth recalling at this point Karl Popper’s paradox of tolerance who, in The Open Society and Its Enemies, recognized that “if we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are unwilling to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed and tolerance with them. In this formulation, I am not implying, for example, that we should always suppress the manifestations of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them with rational arguments and have them held in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be the least wise of decisions. But we should proclaim the right to suppress them, if necessary, even by force; for it may easily happen that they are unwilling to meet us at the level of rational argumentation, but claim to repudiate all argumentation; they may forbid their followers to pay heed to rational argumentation, because it is considered deceptive, and invite them to respond to arguments with the use of their fists or guns. We should therefore proclaim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant.”
There are, after all, historical cases of intolerance toward figures who supported totalitarian regimes. In 1949, for example, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra was forced to revoke Wilhelm Furtwängler’s tenure as conductor over threats of boycott by so many prominent musicians who would refuse to collaborate with a conductor who celebrated the Nazi regime, despite the fact that the denazification trial concerning him ended in an acquittal. Susan Sontag, in the 1970s, did not fail to express her annoyance with Leni Riefenstahl’s reportage on the Nuba culture of Sudan, which she said revived certain clichés of Nazi aesthetics. And there were contrary instances as well: in 1931, Toscanini refused to perform some fascist anthems at the Teatro Comunale in Bologna in the presence of some hierarchs (an episode that cost him a beating by some squadrists and self-exile to the United States), and two years later, invited by Hitler to play in Bayreuth, he responded with another disdainful refusal.
If Governor De Luca would like to give the people of Caserta a moment of Russian culture, then he could turn, as has been suggested from several quarters, to the many artists in collision with the regime who are working in Europe and in regard to whom there is no preclusion whatsoever.
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