Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer (2023) features a scene depicting one of those perfect moments when a clear contradiction between ethics and morality is revealed, namely when the Manhattan Project group discusses launching the first nuclear bomb. The fear that grips their research is that using an atomic bomb against Nazi Germany could unleash the destruction of the world in an unperdictable, but possible chain reaction.
While the project’s team had to first ensure that the scenario of complete planetary annihilation is out of the picture (literally), the scientists displayed a higher regard for the ethics of saving the life of our planet against the morals of defeating evil: if the risk of total annihilation were not discarded, then the bomb could not be used to deter or defeat the Nazis. Thus, it would have been logical to accept an eventual Nazi victory against the horizon of a total annihilation of life on Earth. For them, a future humanity set on the enslavement of the world and the genocide of Jews, queers, disabled people, and Romani would still be preferable to no humanity, let alone no flora and fauna on earth at all.
In the movie, we witness, for a brief moment, scientists visualizing the major consequences of their work and their direct shaping of the world - as catastrophic as that might have been. Confronting a fully weaponized science in a moral war against evil, and the loss of control over the results of their work, they cannot help but cast their refusal to build the bomb as an ethical stand in defense of life in general versus building the destructive bomb by moralizing the war against the Nazis, confronting multiple dilemmas which haunted not only Openheimer, but everybody else involved.
The comparison between the creation of the atomic bomb and art production might seem like a stretch at first, but let’s not forget, that we are confronting a desolated moral battlefield of leftists left to themselves, while fascists profit from their enemies’ fragmentation. Art workers thus face a kind of uncertainty and loss of control of their work and what it proposes that is taking place through the curation of specific interpretations of meanings, or by institutionally-endorsed aesthetic decontextualization. In this pro-Israel vs. pro-Palestine cul-de-sac, or pro-diplomacy versus pro-war in the Ukraine context, art workers, too, face a conflict between an ethical stand for humanity versus a moral one in favor of a particular subsection of humanity.
Although the relationship between war and art may seem less direct, in a world dripping in blood from the ongoing wars in Ukraine, Gaza, Sudan, and elsewhere, the active nodes of our “global art world” find themselves deep in the feedback loop between these conflicts and locally staged culture wars. Who is there to deny the invisible, but undeniable, force from political interest of pro-Israeli lobbies or Pro-Palestinian activist groups, pushing the arts and media to take sides, requesting artists, curators and institutions to clarify their position and to utilize their cultural capital to join in the battlefields.
This is hardly an unexpected consequence in a world that is constantly being reshaped by social media and, increasingly, AI where ongoing global conflicts help people make sense of the local culture wars and then our local context in return is utilized like a lens to make further sense of the world's geopolitical complexities. Not only has this feedback loop been structuring the political grammar of the last couple of years, but it has also given rise to an ambition of moving art beyond the mere discourse of moralization, or even the noble ambition of using it to make an ethical intervention, instead it reproduces the conditions of war within the realms of art and culture towards weaponizing the art itself. Let’s not name any names, but those who are tripping around the world to participate in, or cancel, shows according to particular political affiliations, as well as all who witness these unfortunate acts, know best which events, institutions or individuals represent examples of the art world wars.
Since art has not been able to shake its strong belief in the existence of absolute goods and truths versus evil lies, it is understandable that artists and art workers strive to join the “good” side of the conflict with which they identify. Little do they know that compared to the 20th century, in today’s world, it’s even harder to find the good sides, and that the only thing that separates the conflicting sides is their different degree of wickedness, misrepresentations and distortions which themselves fluctuate on a daily basis. For those artists who were never interested in the question of politics, these conditions are a perfect excuse to further recede into silence by removing themselves from debating or taking sides in conflicts, but artists who are known for engaging with politics end up avoiding stepping on the landmines laid between the two sides only by putting their foot in their mouth.
The restless spirit of the times requires us to go back and examine the mother of all political art, kept within the vault of Walter Benjamin's theoretical legacy. For Benjamin, the aestheticization of politics is when politics itself becomes an art form, often this tactic is used by authoritarian regimes to control and influence the masses through spectacle and emotions, whereas the politicization of aesthetics takes place when art becomes a political tool used to raise awareness, critique societal issues, and inspire social change.
Benjamin's argument from his essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1936), has been used over the last nearly hundred years to warn against the potential dangers of aesthetics replacing politics, and, conversely, as a blueprint for the production of politically engaged art to make matters worse. His other essay “The Author as Producer”, written during his exile in Paris in 1934 and published posthumously, has been used to advocate that politically correct art can, regardless of its formal qualities, self-justify its aesthetics: “[A] work that shows the correct political tendency need to show no other quality.” Conversely, “[A] work that exhibits the correct tendency must of necessity have every other quality.”
In the art world, these particular statements have functioned more or less as religious teachings are used in communities of faith, justifying, if not also encouraging, the political positioning of art. However, with the art world engaged in a war with no clear lines defining good and evil or truth and untruth, the distinctions between aesthetic politics and political aesthetics have collapsed only to the benefit of dogmatisms, ideological fortification, and propaganda from all sides.
The weaponization of art and political activism by artists, curators, and institutions can be seen as a symptom, but also the cause, of something larger: the righteousness with which 21st century humans exercise their values. Today we are led to believe in the absolute evil of our enemies; thus, we are convinced that we can risk escalating local conflicts and compare them to world wars regardless of how this can potentially cause irreparable damage to the culture we form, destroying ties in the form of a (socially) nuclear confrontation. This is why the sooner art and artists begin revisiting their age-old assumptions about their political function and begin acting as agents of doubt rather than conviction, the sooner they can salvage themselves and the fruits of their labor from becoming mere weapons of war rather than agents and tools for understanding and transformation of the world, and making life more tolerable.
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