On the grotesque

How European art has become an obscenity

Boy, there are times when I have to accede to the rigours of age. New Year’s is one of those times.

Still, I fared better this year than last. Last year I was in bed by 11; this year I made it to about 12.30. In the bar of the drab Irish hotel where I was staying, by the time the bells tolled, there were only a half dozen of us left there. Who goes to a hotel bar to celebrate New Year?

It was a forgettable night, and I was in bed early. I had a good night’s sleep.

I woke the next morning to a white winter sun coming through the curtains. After breakfast, I returned to bed and turned on the TV, and was surprised, pleasantly at first, to find that the BBC were showing the 2025 Vienna New Year’s Concert. I thought I would lie back, enjoy the music, and drift in and out of sleep for an hour or two.

But that is not what happened.

I found myself watching with growing horror as the spectacle brought on a feeling of physical illness. I was disgusted by it: by the ostentation, by the smugness, the crassness, the soullessness, the vapidity, the superiority, the supremacy. It was vile. Utterly vile.

For the record, I am not a despiser of the so-called ‘fine arts’. I love classical music; I’ve been moved to tears many times by this or that symphony, and I have a wealth of classical artists in my collection. I’m not even offended by ballet. But the Vienna concert made me want to throw up.

And the reason for it is simple human empathy.

The world is a fucking mess. There’s a genocide ongoing in Palestine. The Lancet reported all the way back in June 2024 that the death toll in Gaza could be as high as 200,000; now it’s probably up around the 300,000 mark. The Gaza Strip has been turned into rubble. Barely a building still stands.

So, just for a moment, put yourself in the shoes of a young girl in Gaza whose every family member has been shredded by a 2000-pound Israeli bomb, or a teenage boy who saw his little brother shot in the head by a sniper, or parents who’ve held their child as it died of starvation because Israel is withholding aid. Or, as a final example, imagine yourself as a doctor who has, for over a year now, treated any number of Palestinians with shrapnel wounds, legs or arms missing, beheaded children, and watched, helplessly, as thousands died in your arms… what are you feeling?

Now imagine that you turn on your phone and you see the wealthy elite of a European country – the same elite whose representatives have cheerled the Israeli slaughter from the beginning – sit dispassionately watching a contrived performance of music and dance. The fine suits and dresses, the chandeliers, the ostentatious surroundings, the look of smug self-satisfaction on their faces… you see all this, and what do you think? What do you feel?

What else but disgust.

The classical European arts have lost all relevance. The heart is gone and the soul is dead. Viewed with respect to current world events, the European arts are nothing more than an absolute grotesquerie, and the grotesqueness increases in direct proportion to the ‘refinement’ of said ‘arts’.

The Vienna 2025 concert made a grand effort to valorise Johann Strauss, but in light of European political nullity such valorisation smacks of nothing more than a still hankered-for European supremacy. ‘The Blue Danube’ is a stunning work of art, but I can no longer enjoy it. The only way such a work can find relevance in the modern world is if it’s recontextualised as a work of irony, being played, say, as a backing track to a montage of the Israeli destruction of villages in Lebanon and the raining of 2000-pound bombs on the innocent civilians of Gaza. Insofar as it fails to address the current state of the world, European art is a grotesque parody.

Maybe we’ll save it one day. Maybe one day we’ll get to listen to it with fresh ears, without it raising the uncomfortable awareness that we are completely divorced from our humanity, that we are blind to the suffering of those with whom we don’t share a language or a skin colour, that we do not care what is happening outside the confines of our walled garden as long as we can still satiate ourselves with luxury goods.

Maybe. But perhaps we’ll have to make a bonfire of Vienna for that to happen.

The people of Gaza are steadfast and strong in the face of their enemy. They are still standing. But if anything can finish them off, it may just be the apathy of the watching world.