The line between art and propaganda can be hard to draw.
For many of us, Pablo Picasso’s Guernica, a mourning of the wanton destruction of Francisco Franco’s Spain, is a long way from Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will, a Nazi-loving paean that used groundbreaking film work in the service of fascism.
But aesthetic and message are often in the eye of the beholder, as we find with the recent controversial exhibit at the University of North Texas about the ongoing war between Israel and Hamas.
The exhibit was, inevitably, pro-Palestinian. We say inevitably because, broadly speaking, American universities now appear incapable of any nuance on the painful complexity of the ongoing fighting between Israelis and Palestinians.
Conservative state lawmakers, led by state Rep. Mitch Little, who represents the area, criticized the exhibit as well as an accompanying lecture as antisemitic, and elements of the work justify their concerns. Describing Israeli actions in Gaza as “genocide” has become commonplace among the academic left, despite the fact that Hamas set off the war by killing more than 1,200 Israelis during a terrorist attack.
To our knowledge, the exhibit at UNT lacked any accompanying context about the Oct. 7, 2023, attack that precipitated Israel’s incursion into Gaza or the underlying reality that Hamas has itself pledged to eliminate the state of Israel.
All that said, it is worrisome when state officials pressure public universities around expression, especially expression like an art exhibit. It’s one thing to insist that protesters not disrupt other students or that they exercise appropriate time, place and manner restraints on their speech. It’s another thing to start policing what constitutes art.
There are deep and painful perspectives about the war from both sides. The loss of life in Gaza, the terror of what happened on Oct. 7, and the nightmare of hostage-taking are all sickening to consider and deserving of understanding through art.
That said, we do believe the exhibit at UNT includes elements that read as propaganda, from the uncritical use of Hamas expressions to the bomb dangling over a stuffed animal in a kaffiyeh.
But there must be a better solution than lawmakers pressuring a university on subjective expression. We can’t help but think of how Texas A&M University responded in 2016 when the white supremacist Richard Spencer was invited by a former student to speak on campus.
A&M couldn’t disinvite the odious Spencer because of free-speech protections on public college campuses. Instead, the university invited Holocaust survivor Max Glauben to offer a more powerful message on what hatred can do to a people.
The problem at universities today is not the representation of controversial ideas. It’s that there is too little in the way of counterbalance with other ideas to challenge the dominant narrative. Too many faculty, students and staff are captive to an ideological frame that they reinforce for one another, without any answer from a different point of view.
What if, near the exhibit at UNT that drew so much controversy, there had been images of what happened Oct. 7? What if people who considered the legitimate grievances of Muslim artists also had to grapple with the fear that Israelis feel living under the specter of kidnapping, rape and murder?
The highest purpose of art is not aesthetic experience, but intellectual, and even spiritual, unveiling of truth. That’s why propaganda can never be art. It cannot illuminate unseen truths.
But a university can create that opportunity by making space for the kind of intellectual debate that two dueling perspectives can engender. That, from our view, would be a far better answer to the exhibit in question than threats from the heavy hand of the state.
This editorial was published by The Dallas Morning News and distributed by Tribune Content Agency.
