Kunst als morele vrijplaats
Andres Serrano’s golden shower posters, Jeff Koons’ Biedermeier pornography, Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Garbage, the City and Death, the literary verbal abuse of Herman Brusselmans, the anti-Ayaan Hirsi Ali rap, the meat gun of Joanneke Meester or the image of Gnome Buttplug in the Rotterdam city center: ‘art expressions’ regularly stir up social dust. Contemporary art wants to push boundaries, disrupt, break taboos, step on toes. The question of whether society should grant it that space (and where the boundary lies) depends partly on whether art actually has a social function. Whoever answers this question in the negative and only emphasizes the moral sanctuary, places art in the vacuum of society: she can do whatever she wants, but no longer matters. However, art can also be seen as the means of making moral explorations. However, anyone who reduces art to its social use does take the sting out of its essentially unsocial nature. Should art allow what isn’t allowed elsewhere?