Art, the State and Religion

The story from Russia, briefly, was this: In January 2003, the Andrei Sakharov Museum in Moscow held an exhibition of new art called "Caution -- Religion." The name gives the idea of what it was about: One triptych showed men crucified on a cross, a Soviet star and a swastika; another featured an icon without a face, inviting visitors to put their own visage in the opening. The show would probably have passed unnoticed had it not been vandalized on the third day by two irate Russian Orthodox believers.

With that, it became a major event. The Russian Orthodox Church assailed the "blasphemy." The director of the Sakharov Museum fought back with ringing defenses of freedom of art. In August, charges against the two attackers were dropped on the ground that the show was more than their religious sensitivities could bear.

By then, every nationalist lawmaker was up in arms. So finally, on Dec. 29, the state prosecutor advised the museum director, Yury Samodurov, and three of the artists that they faced charges of inciting national and religious hatreds. Conviction can mean stiff fines or even prison.

My first reaction was indignation and incredulity. The Russian Orthodox Church has become heavily identified with Russian nationalism and reaction, and some priests and believers have even found common cause with disgruntled old Communists. For someone who had spent a few years as a reporter in the old Soviet Union, the greater dismay came with seeing artists again treated as enemies of the state.

Art had been one of the major vehicles of resistance to the Soviet dictatorship: The closing of an exhibit of avant-garde artists in 1962 by Nikita Khrushchev and the bulldozing of an exhibition of unofficial art in 1974 were among the milestones of the dissident movement. Sadder still, religion had been one of the major targets of Soviet repression, especially public demonstrations of belief, or religious imagery in art or literature. No doubt these memories were in the minds of the 39 artists who raised their works in the Sakharov Museum to warn against a state that had enforced "scientific atheism" so recently now embracing a national church with the same ardor.

OK, argued the defender of Russia in me, but nobody has been convicted of anything yet, and the debate prompted by the trashing of the exhibition has been at least as lively and creative as the one over the Madonna with elephant dung at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, or, more recently, over the Israeli ambassador's angry attempt to smash a work of art in Stockholm that featured the picture of a suicide bomber. True, state prosecutors didn't step in, but in the Brooklyn affair, Rudolph Giuliani, then mayor, matched the Russian parliamentarians huff for puff. Besides, many advanced countries have laws against inciting hatred or vandalizing revered symbols.

To be frank, I too become indignant at deliberately provocative uses of hallowed religious or national symbols. Insults may be protected as free speech, but not under the canons of good taste or cultural tolerance. One work, a Coca-Cola advertisement with the words "This is my blood," taken from the Last Supper, may be explained as a sophisticated artistic statement, as it was at the Sakharov show, but it is certain to cause anguish among believers. The usual defense of curators is that they are seeking "artistic dialogue."

The right to free expression does not absolve people from responsibility for what they choose to present. That does not exclude shock as an artistic vehicle. But there is a line beyond which shock becomes offense and even anguish, and it is not one that should be casually crossed.

Still, there's something medieval about summoning a commission of experts, as the Russian prosecutor did, to determine whether the exhibition "utilized verbal or visual methods" that were demeaning to "any ethnic, racial or religious group." Letting the state decide what's good or bad for society led to the suppression of all the best Russian artists and writers in the Soviet Union.

Basically, the contents of art are none of the state's business. A mature society should be able to tolerate even offensive art, or at least to find ways of coping with it that do not involve the police. That is especially true in a country like Russia, which is painfully emerging from 70 years of brutal state control over all intellectual and artistic life. That same Sakharov Museum has vast panels of small, black-and-white mug shots of people who perished under the Soviet Union's forced cultural and political orthodoxy. Many are of museum curators and artists.

Serge Schmemann is a senior writer at The New York Times, where this comment first appeared.