Today, the New York Philharmonic completed its much anticipated concert in Pyongyang, North Korea. It was the first time so many outsiders had visited the isolated country. Though the trip was ostensibly apolitical, as usual, people on both sides of the demilitarized zone used the opportunity to push an agenda.
But this is about more than politics. When art is involved, some things suddenly seem more important.
More after the jump.
The New York Times, along with most media outlets, consistently pointed out North Korea's shortcomings:
Outside, in real Pyongyang, where electricity is often scarce, most buildings were dark. Malnutrition persists in the countryside. Yet North Korea presented a lavish welcome on Monday to its latest visiting delegation, the New York Philharmonic: a gala performance of traditional music and dance, and an endless banquet with quail eggs, roast mutton and pheasant-ball soup.
Of course, they're right. The North Korean regime is oppressive and totalitarian. It's a cold war relic. But that anachronism persists on both sides, with Secretary Condoleezza Rice playing down the visit's importance, even though the State Department helped organize the trip. Others, like Terry Teachout writing in the Wall Street Journal, were more explicit:
Eric Latzky, the Philharmonic's director of communications, gave the game away when he made the following euphemism-clotted statement to the New York Times: "We went to Pyongyang and discovered a city that was clean and orderly and not without beauty, and had a kind of high level of culture and intelligence." Note especially that last phrase: A kind of high level of culture. In fact, Pyongyang under Kim Jong Il, who has imposed a Stalin-style cult of personality on the country he rules, is widely reported to be exactly like London under Big Brother in George Orwell's "Nineteen Eighty-Four," where "culture" existed solely to serve the state and its murderous purposes.
The simplistic us vs. them attitude that persists on both sides of this divide serves no one. If we ever hope for true dialogue with the North Korean people - and there are fitful signs of progress - we have to give up the idea that eliminating their society is our ultimate goal. Just as it is with the war on terror or the war on drugs, existential battles against an ideology are bound to run directly into shades of gray. Life just isn't that simple.
When art is involved, the lines grow even hazier. Clearly, art is beyond the reach of totalitarian regimes. Art in its purest sense celebrates human possibility, and as such is antithetical to any control. Art is probably most related to anarchy in that sense, a search for radical truth. Vaclav Havel, Czech writer, dramatists, and eventual political leader once said:
There is only one art, whose sole criterion is the power, the authenticity, the revelatory insight, the courage and suggestiveness with which it seeks its truth. Thus, from the standpoint of the work and its worth it is irrelevant to which political ideas the artist as a citizen claims allegiance, which ideas he would like to serve with his work or whether he holds any such ideas at all.
Art utterly rejects the base instincts of modern politics, especially the unreasonable dichotomies forged during the Cold War. While diplomats and pundits at home and abroad were trying to bend the Philharmonic's trip towards their own outdated ends, something beautiful happened under their noses:
As the New York Philharmonic played the opening notes of “Arirang,” a beloved Korean folk song, a murmur rippled through the audience. Many people perched forward in their seats.
The piccolo played a long, plaintive melody. Cymbals crashed, harp runs flew up, the violins soared. And tears began forming in the eyes of the staid audience, row upon row of men in dark suits, women in colorful high-waisted dresses called hanbok and all of them wearing pins with the likeness of Kim Il-sung, the nation’s founder.
And right there, the Philharmonic had them. The full-throated performance of a piece deeply resonant for both North and South Koreans ended the orchestra’s historic concert in this isolated nation on Tuesday in triumph.
The audience applauded for more than five minutes, and orchestra members, some of them crying, waved. People in the seats cheered and waved back, reluctant to let the visiting Americans leave.
This is about more than politics. This is about more than "sing song diplomacy." If this trip is the beginning of a thaw in relations between North Korea and the West, good. But if not, that's also good. This trip was, above all, about making music. It was about touching people's lives. It was about bringing people - not politics - closer together.
I hope that when the players in the Philharmonic return home to New York, they remember the trip not for the historical moment they participated in but for the art they created. I hope they dream not of the horrors of Kim Jong-il's totalitarian regime, but of the plaintive strains of Gershwin and Dvorak floating through the air, and of the tears on the cheeks of the human beings in attendance that night.
(Originally posted at The Seminal)