If Life Isn’t Valued, Art Will Lose Its Meaning

A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic.

--Josef Stalin

Once upon a time not so very long ago, when Stalin is reported to have made his famous remark, it still took thousands of deaths to turn personal tragedy into mere statistics. Today, life is much cheaper.

Art critic Christopher Knight’s blood turns to ice at the thought of the cultural tragedy that might have occurred as a result of the terrorist bombing of the Uffizi Gallery in Florence (“Uffizi Palace Blast a Deeply Personal Attack,” Calendar, May 29), but apparently none of us can regard the five lives that were lost that morning as even statistically significant.

After all, nearly five times that many people died from various acts of terrorism on the previous quiet, fairly normal weekend in L.A. A mere five deaths is barely worth mentioning. At any rate, Knight barely mentions them--spending a scant six words on his way to a concession that his first panicked reaction to news of the attack was largely unjustified in terms of the damage done to the collection.

Of course, it is not an art critic’s business to spend his dearly rationed column inches regretting or speculating about the five human lives that are lost in an attack on one of the world’s great museums--three of those were youngsters, and one of them an artist himself. I’m not faulting Knight for his emphasis, only for his stance.

The critic’s job is to see with uncommon discernment what may be unclear or even invisible to most of us--to tell us what we should be looking at, how we should look and why it matters. We should be looking at mindless, anonymous terrorism--whether intensely political or merely recreational--not because it is an assault on “the expansive greatness of our collective heritage” but because it is a denial of the dignity and value of each individual human life--which is the only statement that our collective heritage of great art and music and literature can or does assert.

Stalin’s discerning critic, Russian theologian Nikolai Berdyaev, drew a distinction that bears recalling here. There is a difference, he says, between barbarism and bestiality. The barbarian may burn books or bomb paintings, but at least his outrages are assertions of his own vain, surging, human individuality--a shocking way of saying, “I matter more than these dead things.” The beast, as Knight notes without reflection, is the nameless, faceless nobody who kills, maims and destroys without asserting or meaning anything.

Barbarians can be civilized, but the dreamless, dehumanized, dead-eyed young men and women who set off high explosives in crowded streets or shoot randomly from cars speeding through the night--these beasts are probably beyond redemption by anyone or anything.

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What really chills the blood and freezes the heart is the realization that these beasts are our creation, this alienated generation’s reigning art form. Mass society and the merely statistical reality that governs it have created millions of nameless, faceless, lifelong nobodies who are invisible and insignificant except as they can be expressed by percentages in the Gallup Poll or the Nielsen Index.

The message of all art must be that this is not so. Every painting, every poem, every chord is an assertion of the unique, eternally significant value of the personality that it expresses. Our great collective human heritage was not made by us collectively or statistically, it was made one piece at a time, by one man or woman at a time, alone and perhaps socially insignificant, but still declaring proudly to the ages, “I am here, and I matter.”

If individual lives don’t matter much anymore, if the death of a laborer in the central city is merely a weekend statistic and the loss of a student architect or an archivist and his family are only by-the-ways, then even the greatest art is meaningless. Saving it all won’t redeem us as a society, losing it all would be no more statistically significant than any other weekend’s incidental orgy of mass destruction.