Exhibition contrasting beauty and horror has some visitors to the Royal Academy asking, ‘Is this stuff really art?’

Seated on the wood bench of an Auschwitz bus stop installed in the Royal Academy, curator Norman Rosenthal is explaining that beauty and horror are opposite sides of the same coin.

“Look at Greek tragedy, ‘The Oresteia,’ look at ‘King Lear,’ ‘Tristan and Isolde,’ Dostoevsky,” Rosenthal said, building his case across centuries. “Art is not about being pretty in the pejorative sense of the word. It is not about baubles.”

As expected, there aren’t too many pretty baubles in the Royal Academy’s “Apocalypse” exhibition opening here today.Subtitled “Beauty and Horror in Contemporary Art,” the show claims to be a secular interpretation of the biblical story of St. John the Divine, a tale that ranges from the horrors of genocide to the beauties of utopia.

The exhibition of 15 contemporary artists contains elements of both, but it is horror that sticks in the skull, erasing beauty in the way that the view of a car wreck easily overpowers the memory of a sunset.

Three years after the academy’s “Sensation” exhibition of Young British Artists displayed a dead shark in formaldehyde and the Virgin Mary decorated with elephant dung, “Apocalypse” doesn’t seem shocking. Yet, as with “Sensation,” there are those who charge that the curators, Rosenthal and Max Wigram, have stacked the show with controversy-courting “shock art” to boost attendance.

Similarly, “Apocalypse” is already reigniting the debate that accompanies some contemporary shows--whether this is audacious art or some sort of grand hoax on an art-dim public.

Whatever the verdict, “Apocalypse” is an arrangement of in-your-face installations, paintings and videos that cause discomfort from the get-go. Rosenthal and Wigram make that point explicitly and physically by forcing visitors to enter the exhibition bent at the waist, practically crawling through a low door into Gregor Schneider’s dark and dank “Cellar.”

“It is sinister but incredibly beautiful,” Rosenthal said. “You go through a hole and you’re in another world. It is magical, but desperately real.”

Real it is, taken piece by piece from the cellar of Schneider’s own home in Rheydt, Germany. It’s disorienting, the sort of labyrinthine space, crumbling and oozing insulation, that you never wanted to venture into alone as a child. Or, it turns out, as an adult.

From Schneider’s black maze, you emerge into sudden whiteness and a room of paintings by the Belgian artist Luc Tuymans that seem soft and pleasing in their muted tones until it’s explained that the subjects are taken from a police photograph of a murder scene and from a World War II propaganda poster celebrating German folklore.

“Tuymans says that fear is an everyday experience,” Wigram said.

Wax Figure of the Pope Hit by a Meteorite

This is a central point of “Apocalypse,” that most of us are aware of the possibility of disaster striking at any moment.

“It is a permanent state we are all in. In Los Angeles, it is at the back of everyone’s mind that an earthquake can strike. Or an earthquake on a personal level or a social level. Artists have always dealt with this. Every generation works these things through in a different way,” he said, mentioning Bruegel’s “The Triumph of Death” and Max Beckman’s “Birds’ Hell.”

In fact, the theme of “Apocalypse” recalls the subject of “Helter Skelter: L.A. Art in the 1990s,” a hugely influential 1992 exhibition at Los Angeles’ Museum of Contemporary Art, which also examined the dark side of human nature. Taking its title from the infamous apocalyptic obsessions of Charles Manson, “Helter Skelter” did not travel, but its catalog was widely read in Europe and helped catapult many of the show’s artists to international reputations. It also remains one of the most highly attended shows in MOCA’s history.

If the Royal Academy’s “Apocalypse” seems overly paranoid, consider recent discussions of a meteorite’s “near-miss”--by a few million miles--of Earth. The timing couldn’t be better for Rosenthal and Wigram. In another gallery is Maurizio Cattelan’s “La Nona Ora” (The Ninth Hour), a life-sized wax figure of the pope struck down by a meteorite that has fallen through the roof of the museum. The pope is miraculously alive and wears an expression that is a mixture of pain and prayer.

The exhibition juxtaposes light and dark again and again. New York-based artist Mariko Mori provides the show’s grandest statement of beauty with her glass “Dream Temple.” It provides a moment of spiritual peace before you encounter the unmet expectations and failed relationship between two gay men in a video and installation by Mike Kelley of Los Angeles. The installation, taken from a photograph of a theatrical production in a high school yearbook, is a 1950s room that boasts a centerpiece open oven, a Sylvia Plath-style death chamber.

Miniature Nazi Soldiers, But Where are the Jews?

The centerpiece of the exhibition--both its inspiration and the work that inevitably will prove most controversial--is “Hell,” by London brothers Jake and Dinos Chapman. This is a room-sized landscape of the Holocaust made up of thousands of tiny, hand-painted Nazi soldiers engaged in every imaginable form of mutilation and genocide.

It is actually nine landscapes mounted on trestles and laid out in the shape of a swastika, each more revolting than the last. There are vultures feeding on mounds of human heads, heads on stakes, limbless bodies, hangings, castrations, crucifixions, gas ovens, a mind-numbing display of Nazis feeding on bloody Nazis, for there are no Jews in evidence.

“The soldiers are doing it to themselves, to each other. They are eating themselves,” Wigram said. “There are no Jewish people in this. It is a battle scene without opposition.”

Critics will accuse the Chapmans of feeding “Holocaust fatigue,” of cleansing history of its true victims and producing what Harald Fricke of the German newspaper Tageszeitung called “the British preference for sensation, Nazi trash and sexploitation.”

The Chapmans have said they are not inuring people to the worst horror of the 20th century, but demonstrating to people how quickly they are inured.

“Our intention was not in any way to trivialize the Holocaust,” Jake Chapman told the Independent newspaper. “This is an event that’s beyond representation. Using toy soldiers is a way of emphasizing the impossibility of that. Here are these little figures that are totally incompatible with the pathos they’re supposed to support.”

Curator Rosenthal, whose own grandparents died at Auschwitz, is one of their greatest defenders.

“Contemporary art is always difficult,” Rosenthal said at the Auschwitz bus stop--a sculpture by Darren Almond meant to show how readily people went about their daily lives as Jews burned in the camp nearby.

Like this minimalist piece, Rosenthal says that the Chapmans’ “Hell” is a look into “the abyss” of human horror.

“The function of the artist is to look, to enter the minds of those operating the machinery of death and to contemplate how this came about,” he wrote in the catalog for “Apocalypse.” “In other words, the artist can add a profoundly illuminating perspective that even the most assiduous historian cannot. One major task of the artist is to say that . . . we are all implicated. It is important that we do not look away and merely take refuge in superficial beauty.”

Koons’ Balloon Dog Lightens Things Up

Finally, from the Chapmans’ heart of darkness, the “Apocalypse” visitor emerges into the light and brightly colored world of New York’s Jeff Koons. It is a high-gloss world of chromium stainless-steel balloons that reflect what he says is his optimism.

“We are artists living at the change of the millennium, and these are interesting times for art with so many visual options and technologies,” Koons said. “The medium is not the message--the message is the gesture, and “Apocalypse” shows the different type of gestures that exist.”

At the center of this room is an enormous red “Balloon Dog,” a steel replica of a balloon-turned-dachshund that a party clown would make.

“This is a different view. It is putting your best foot forward,” Koons said. “But it also has a bit of a Trojan horse quality. It is an optimistic form such as you might find in the park on a weekend. At the same time, it does have an internal life that can be different from what it seems.”

Smiling and soft-spoken in a gray suit and black tie, Koons, too, seems like the calm at the center of a dark storm of art. But that image too, quickly darkens as he explains that he made the pieces during a custody battle over his son.

Here is Rosenthal’s flip side of the coin.

“I made these pieces when I was going through one of the worst moments of my life. I was losing a sense of humanity. This work helped me to hang on,” Koons said.

Did he ever regain custody of his son?

“No,” he said. “But my son can look at this work one day and realize how much his father was thinking about him.”