Is It Worth Risking Ones Life for a Pice of Art

Saved: The real ?Monument Men? deliver Leonardo da Vinci?s ?Lady With an Ermine? to safety. Paradigm by National Archives

George Clooney's new film, "The Monuments Men," is based on the real-life story of a team of scholars and artists who threw on some fatigues and dashed off to Europe during Earth State of war II to save imperiled art. Their mission is very explicitly framed equally a heroic struggle to salve Western Culture (with that capital "c"), "our way of life," from the Germans and later the Russians. This was a boxing equally worthy as others fought during the state of war, a point driven home past a shot that juxtaposes a charred Picasso with a barrelful of gilded-capped man teeth.

If that visual makes y'all a little queasy, then y'all will no uncertainty recoil from the fact that Franklin Roosevelt's administration backed this culture-saving effort while failing to put equal resources into saving Jews.

The film, while not particularly successful as a slice of art itself, raises larger questions about the value of fine art and whether, and how, it tin can exist measured against human life. Can we ever justify giving money to supporting arts and civilisation when nosotros could be saving lives?

I imagine that most of us, should we accept been sitting in the Oval Office during the war, believe that we would have sidelined the Picasso in favor of the humans to whom those gold-capped teeth belonged. Merely if we follow the thinking of the philosopher Peter Singer, the vast majority of the states choose fine art and culture over life each twenty-four hours. I know I do.

Vocaliser's famous idea experiment on giving goes like this: You are on your fashion to piece of work, and you detect a kid drowning. Would you jump into the pond to help relieve him? Even if you ruined a nice pair of shoes? The answer is fairly obvious for anyone who is not a sociopath. But taken to the next level of abstraction, things get blurrier for most people. Whatever extra coin spent on things like an unnecessary pair of shoes is akin to assuasive a child to drown. For Vocalist, the $20 you might spend on a novel and your annual contribution to the local art museum are in the same category: coin toward beauty and pleasure that could have been donated to an organization similar Oxfam, which would have used it to save a child's life.

In an op-ed in The New York Times published final August, Singer states, in no uncertain terms, that one should not give money to the arts. He draws upwardly a hypothetical betwixt giving coin to an art museum with plans to build a new fly and giving coin to an arrangement that prevents trachoma, a treatable communicable diseases that causes blindness. Basically, if you support the new wing, you lot are responsible for people going blind.

That we could all sacrifice some of our luxuries to give coin to those in need is a given. Americans currently rank 13th in charitable giving in the world, and with income inequality ascension on a national and global scale, those of united states of america closer to the pinnacle certainly could live with less in order to requite more. So, fine, no more than Tuesday nighttime sushi, or iPhone upgrades. There'due south at least $50 a month for trachoma. But does this as well mean that we should refrain from supporting arts and culture, whether as consumers or every bit patrons? And what about the money we spend on religious objects?

Singer's philosophy has a stark simplicity that makes it very appealing. There's something attractive about the idea of relying on a rigid bureaucracy of values to guide how we should behave in society and in the larger global community. Fifty-fifty if we don't immediately sell our cars and donate the coin to dying children, it is still hard non to fiercely nod along to the idea that nosotros actually need to salve that drowning child.

Though if nosotros do follow Vocaliser'southward line of thinking, it leaves u.s. with a vision of the world where art and civilization, religious and otherwise, are subjugated by the imperative to save human lives. Sounds kind of dour, correct?

Role of the outcome hither is that Singer's theory ignores civilisation'southward chapters to create empathy and sensitivity. Unlike jail cell phones and sushi, culture can teach us nearly the subjectivity of our existence, and provide us with the tools we demand to delve into the memories and myths — cultural and individual — with which we environs ourselves. These are the very things that inspire generosity, that allow us to recognize the humanity in others as nosotros acquire to come across it within ourselves. That nosotros ofttimes arrive at these realizations through the experience of pleasance and beauty does not discount their touch on.

The problem with civilization and the good it produces is that it is harder to quantify than, say, curing i,000 cases of trachoma.

Still, Thomas Wartenberg, a philosophy professor at Mount Holyoke, says one could use the Vocalizer line of thinking and come with an reverse result. Vocalist is a utilitarian philosopher, which means he believes that ethical judgments are based on "the greatest happiness of the greatest number," equally the philosopher Jeremy Bentham put information technology.

"A great painting will be seen by many people over the course of many years. One could argue that, even if the increase in their well-being was not equally dramatic as that of the divergence between life and death, it might corporeality to a very significant increase in overall welfare," Wartenberg told me.

"Barbarous as it might seem, if we utilise the utilitarian principle in an unbiased manner, it could plow out that it'due south improve to let a small number of people die in order to save a lot of artistic masterworks," he said.

In the Talmud, there is a brief anecdote that is quite similar to Singer's drowning child scenario. Tractate Sotah Page 21b states: "What is a foolish pietist like? — e.g., a child drowning in the river, and he says: 'Permit me outset remove my phylacteries.' By the fourth dimension he removed his phylacteries, the child has drowned."

The obvious difference is that it is the trappings of religion, and not materialism, standing in the way of the rescue. Though the other and, in my opinion, more important distinction is that there is no expectation that this pious man will permanently abandon the practice of laying tefillin, not to mention buying the phylacteries, in favor of dedicating his life to teaching every child on the planet to swim — therefore preventing future drowning deaths. This isn't a lesson privileging concrete needs over spiritual or cultural ones, simply instead a betoken that one can temporarily abandon religious responsibilities in lodge to save a human life.

Thanks to the 2d Commandment, Jews don't have much of a visual arts tradition to maintain, but this doesn't mean that we have avoided the fetishization of symbolic, and expensive, objects altogether. From our extremely costly manus-calligraphed Torahs, to the dwellings that business firm our places of worship, to our individual Sabbath table settings, nosotros've got our off-white share of possessions that we prize.

When I asked my friend, Jewish text scholar Crimson Namdar, what he thought near Vocalist's imperative, he said he far preferred the Jewish philosophy of giving, which, as many interpret today, calls for giving 10% of ane'southward annual income to charity. He also pointed out that Jewish scripture doesn't call for the eradication of poverty, but instead merely to alleviate the suffering.

"The thought that you volition be totally selfless, and will resist bringing beauty into your own life through art and pleasure, that is just not applicative philosophy," Namdar said. "The beauty of the Jewish mode of thinking is that it doesn't create a model that is impossible to live upwardly to."

Namdar reminded me of a line from "our anti-Semitic friend" Ezra Pound's verse form Canto xiii: ""Anyone can run to excesses, / "It is easy to shoot past the mark, / "It is hard to stand business firm in the center."

Though peradventure it takes someone like Singer, in all his excess, to remind us of the importance of giving in the first place.

Fifty-fifty if I tin can justify buying tickets to Twelfth Night or giving to the Met over donating to malaria research, I want to be aware of what I am really deciding between, and accepting the discomfort that difficult decisions similar this might bring.

Elissa Strauss is a contributing editor to the Forrad.

The views and opinions expressed in this article are the writer's own and do non necessarily reflect those of the Forward. Find more perspective in Opinion.

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Source: https://forward.com/opinion/193208/how-many-lives-is-a-da-vinci-masterpiece-worth/