This article appeared in BreakPoint's Findings Journal.

The Turner Prize is England's most prestigious award for contemporary art, carrying a prize of close to $30,000 and exhibition at the posh Tate Gallery. The winner for the year 2001 is Martin Creed's piece entitled The Lights Going On and Off.

The work consists of an empty room. You go into the gallery and there is nothing there. After awhile, the lights come on. Then the lights go out. That's all there is to it. The winner of the Turner Prize for the best contemporary work of art is nothing. And the particular nothingness put forth by the artist won him the $30,000 prize and the acclaim of the art world. If the best that contemporary art can do in the year 2001 is lights out in an empty room, the art world has surely reached a nadir, or, looked at in another way, a turning point.

Stylistically, The Lights Going On and Off might be thought to finish off minimalism, that curiously long-lived experiment that may have been interesting at one time, but which grew less so as the twentieth century went on and artists kept trying to outdo each other. Much of modern and contemporary art has been essentially the illustration of some theory. Artists began wondering about what is the least line or gesture that can constitute a work of art. Picasso drew pictures, such as the famous Don Quixote print, that consisted of a single line, undertaken without lifting his pen. These and similar drawings were interesting and aesthetically pleasing. But then artists had to see just how minimal they could get.

Before long, they gave us the black canvas. Then, the empty frame. More recently, artists have come up with "conceptual art." This means there is no actual art, just the idea for a work of art. The typed description is put up on the wall of the gallery. Now we have nothing in the gallery. If Mr. Creed's work will be at long last considered the final experiment in minimalism—beyond which one cannot go—then he indeed deserves the Turner Prize and the thanks of a grateful public.

But his work is telling in a different way. It shows just how irrelevant art has become, how out of touch, not just with the human condition but also with the times. The Lights Going On and Off won the Turner Prize for 2001, the year the planes crashed into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, igniting a time of terrorism and war. The world is now convulsed by clashes of civilizations and ideals, primal hatreds, the prospect of mass destruction, not to mention economic crises, assaults on freedom, epidemics, global turmoil, and more. And the art world's contribution to the great debates, to the cultural struggles, to the crises in sensibility that characterized 2001 and beyond is, what? An empty room?

One would think that the times would call for art to engage such monumental concerns. There was a time when art would mediate great issues, challenging, opening people's minds, helping them confront life in all of its complexity. Indeed, such art is doubtless being made. But the "art world," the coterie of critics, artists, and collectors who define the trends and award the prizes, seems to have gotten too precious, too narrow, inbred, and content-free to have much to say to the actual world, which suffers and struggles.

This detachment from the human condition was part of the legacy of artistic modernism. Abstraction, "art for art's sake," formalism, and related characteristics of modern art posited the work of art as a privileged, self-referential object. "Pure art" had no need to represent objects in the external world, but could aspire to "pure form," purged of content and extra-artistic meaning. Though many of the modernist experiments produced work that was interesting and aesthetically beautiful, the connection of art to the human condition—at least in mainstream academic circles, and with some important exceptions—became weaker and weaker.

In fairness, Mr. Creed already had his idea before September 11, and the preparations of the Tate were doubtless well underway before the prize was awarded. On September 10, The Lights Going On and Off must have seemed far more interesting than it did afterward. It must have seemed clever in a time of peace and prosperity, whereas now it seems embarrassingly trivial.

If The Lights Going On and Off takes minimalism and self-referential detachment about as far as they can go, maybe this work is pivotal. Maybe it marks the end of twentieth-century art, a period whose minimalism and self-referential detachment did seem new and creative at the time, but that time was a century ago. Perhaps, when the lights are finally turned off on the twentieth century and its art, this new century and this new cultural climate will find expression in a different kind of art.

ART AND TRANSGRESSION
Avant-garde artists have been trying to get beyond the modernism of the twentieth century in different ways. Postmodernists assume that the problems of the last century have been due to such things as rationalism and the belief that truth, goodness, and beauty are absolute. Many contemporary artists, having rejected the transcendent God and the biblical "beauty of holiness" (Ps. 29:2 kjv), are left with no grounds for beauty other than a culturally constructed oppressive power. To undermine that oppression, they have been experimenting with a different kind of aesthetic.

Instead of making works that embody beauty, meaning, and aesthetic standards, many artists are trying instead to be "challenging." One way is to be "transgressive," creating a reaction in people by shocking them. Those who cultivate an aesthetic of transgression have to keep crossing the lines. And they have to keep finding lines to cross. In a society that agrees that values are relative, shocking the audience, of course, gets harder and harder to do.

Blasphemy gets a predictable reaction from Christians, but that has become too easy. The excrement motif—immersing Christ on the Cross in urine, followed by pelting the Virgin Mary with fecal matter—has been done to death. Portraying Christ as a homosexual and Mary as a sex object pretty much exhausts those possibilities. Besides, how can blasphemy have much of an effect in a culture for which nothing is sacred?

The Holocaust is, sort of, sacred. The genocidal extermination of millions in the concentration camps makes people serious. It was only a matter of time before artists attempted to "challenge" viewers by trivializing the Holocaust.

Recently, New York's Jewish Museum, of all places, put together the show Mirroring Evil: Nazi Imagery/Recent Art. It featured work such as Alan Schechner's It's the Real Thing: Self-Portrait at Buchenwald, a photograph of emaciated concentration camp inmates, into which the artist has digitally-inserted a picture of himself, mugging with a Diet Coke.

Other works of art in the show included concentration camps made out of Legos and Zyklon B gas canisters done up with the logos of Chanel and Tiffany's. The juxtaposition of Pop Art with Holocaust documentation is one of those meaningless stylistic fusions of which postmodern artists are fond. The controversy the show provoked and the Holocaust survivors protesting outside were considered part of the art.

Another artistic movement has been to sculpt using the medium of dead bodies. Damien Jacques started the fad by buying up cadavers in Mexico, cutting them up, and posing them in still lifes. He only exhibited the photographs, though (such as the head of a dead man on a plate, surrounded by vegetables). Later, he exhibited the actual bodies of cut-up animals, displayed in large glass boxes filled with formaldehyde. Now, in the inevitable and totally predictable course of an artistic movement, an artist is displaying actual human corpses that he has mutilated.

Gunther von Hagens, a German artist who was formerly a medical doctor in Communist East Germany, has been exhibiting Body World at the Atlantis Gallery in London and other prestigious galleries. Over eight million people have seen the traveling exhibit, which has been shown in Japan, Belgium, Austria, and Germany. The show consists of some thirty human bodies that he has skinned, embalmed in plastic, and mounted in various bizarre poses that mock the dead.

After 9/11, the artistry of carnage did not seem so clever or so ironic or so titillating anymore. The workers at Ground Zero were pulling fragments of bodies out of the rubble, bodies of human beings with families who mourned them. They were carrying out their grisly work tenderly, with compassion and love. When another body was found, however mutilated and torn, work stopped. The body would be wrapped in a flag, and the workers would all pause to pay their respect to a life that had been taken.

With such poignant images dominating the collective imagination, the stock of artistic corpse desecrators had to go down. Both the terrorists and artists like Damien Jacques and Gunther von Hagens provoked the aching question, "Why would anyone do this to another human being?"

THE PASSION OF NEW YORK CITY
New York City is America's cultural capital—the home of the publishing industry, the playground of the intellectual elite, the home of the trendsetters and the fashion industry, the great media center—and it is the epicenter of the art world.

The World Trade Center housed a number of collections and had on its walls numerous works of art, all destroyed. Many artists had studios nearby, and some of them lost everything—including years of work—in the collateral damage.

Artists suffered like everyone else in the city, and, with everyone else, they came together as Americans and as human beings. Artists joined in paying tribute to the firemen and rescue workers, those ordinary folks normally scorned by the artistic elite.

A characteristic trait of the postmodernist attitude is irony. Since nothing is real and everything is fake, nothing can be taken seriously. Everything becomes a joke, and the cool persona is someone who goes through life with a sense of detached, cynical irony. Yet after the attack, Jerry Seinfeld, the personification of New York cynical comedy, was putting together a benefit for the victims. David Letterman, the king of mockery, was comforting Dan Rather on "Late Show with David Letterman," both of them close to tears. Hip publications like the online magazine Salon were printing testimonials from self-confessed flag-burners turned flag-wavers. Intellectuals, novelists, and artists were changing their tunes like musicians in Carnegie Hall. It became possible to take things seriously again.

There were exceptions. The avant-garde composer Karlheinz Stockhausen was playing to the old rules when he called the attack on the World Trade Center "the greatest work of art imaginable for the whole cosmos."

Indeed, in terms of the pre-9/11 aesthetic, the collapse of the towers was indeed "transgressive." It did create an unprecedented response in its audience, that sensation of shock so prized by contemporary artists. Here, too, was an ultimate expression of abstract formalism unconnected with any kind of human content or moral context, with one commentator citing the visual power of the "shimmering" motion of the walls as the towers came down. Stockhausen's very remark, that the terrorist attack was the greatest work of art in the history of the world—so outrageous and so defiant in its insensitivity, coming just days after some three thousand people died—implied that the attack could be seen as an audacious bit of "performance art."

So why was the art world unamused? The New York arts community, grieving like the rest of the city, was unimpressed with the bon mot, condemning Stockhausen for his tastelessness and his gross insensitivity—sort of like what ordinary Americans had been saying about some of the creations of the New York art community. Two concerts and a festival that were to have been held in Stackhausen's honor were canceled. A New York Times music critic said that the remark may have ruined his career.

Voices in the art world began calling for a new artistic movement, one that is more "human" than the slick cynicism that had ruled before. The New York Times asked a number of artists what the attack will now mean for the arts. Pulitzer prize-winning composer John Corigliano called for the recovery of "our titanic richness of musical resource with unmistakable structural order." That is, the attacks made him want to recover the artistic heritage of the past. Though the fashion had been to denigrate Western civilization and its legacy, the brutal assaults against the West and everything it stands for, on the part of Islamist terrorists, apparently made that legacy more precious. Corigliano also responded to the attacks with a sense that the arts need "order," perhaps a recognition that irrationalism, formlessness, and moral chaos make terrorism possible.

Another artist in the series, songwriter Paul Simon, of Simon and Garfunkel fame, noted the sounds of silence after the attack, the "almost total absence of the popular culture from the nation's airwaves." Indeed, in the days after the attack, movie theaters, shopping malls, sporting events, and other parts of the entertainment industry shut down, and the hundreds of television networks now available on satellite or cable replaced nearly all their regular programming with coverage of the attack and its aftermath. The pop culture—art as an entertainment commodity for mass consumption and commercial success—stopped in its tracks, as the whole nation got serious.

But Simon also called for the high arts to get serious as well. He condemned the nihilism that had dominated the arts up to that time. He predicted a shift in the arts, a "rebirth": "We should recognize that seismic events impact on the creative process and that artistic and spiritual rebirth can follow a shattering experience."

WHAT NEXT?
There are other signs that the culture might be ready for an "artistic and spiritual rebirth."

Gunther von Hagens's macabre show of sculpted corpses in England attracted big crowds, but also protesters. A father named Martin Wynness, saying that the exhibit was disrespectful to the dead, poured paint on the floor and threw a blanket over a display of the body of a pregnant woman, cut open to display the body of her dead baby. He was charged with "vandalism," as if the artist's desecrations were not vandalism of a more monstrous kind. In the meantime, the Turner Prize-winner, The Lights Going On and Off, is inspiring not admiration but ridicule throughout hipper-than England. A woman named Jacqueline Crofton threw eggs into that empty room, whereupon the Tate Gallery prissily banned her from the premises for life.

What is telling is that Crofton is a genuine artist, known for painting realistic, compassionate portraits of homeless people. She represents a large group of artists who have been keeping up the tradition of art as having something to do with the external world, as expressing and conveying and teaching transcendent truths and moral reality. Such artists have tended not to win the most prestigious prizes. They do not have to stage protests to be banned from galleries like the Tate. But perhaps artists like Crofton may take center stage, once the dust settles from 9/11.

True, the effect of 9/11 might be fleeting. Already much of the culture has returned to normal. And how is it possible to recover truth, goodness, and beauty without a worldview that allows for them?

Though one would think the terrorist attacks and the subsequent war against al-Qaeda would prove that all values, all cultures, and all religions are not equally valid, postmodern relativism keeps persisting in the teeth of all evidence. The difference may be that before 9/11, the common assumption was that all religions are equally good. Now, many are thinking that all religions are equally bad. Christians are being lumped with the Taliban, and some avant-garde thinkers are advocating a new libertinism and moral debauchery as a way to defy Islamic moralism.

HINTS OF A BRIGHTER FUTURE
So there are plenty of wrong turns the culture could take, in light of 9/11—a heightened secularism, a new universal religion that will not tolerate traditional faiths, a freedom that turns to license, or a fear that extinguishes freedom altogether. It is too early to tell what the effects of 9/11 may be, either on the arts or on American culture.

But we might look for hints in the way the events of 9/11 are memorialized. There is great debate over how to commemorate the attacks and how to honor the dead and the rescuers. But for all the contentiousness and disagreements in such discussions, there is a universal sense that 9/11 must be commemorated, that we must build some kind of memorial. Human beings have a need for art. Not just as decoration, or as status symbols, or as theoretical constructions, but as an expression of meaning.

The most successful memorial so far has been the twin towers of light. On practically the site of the World Trade Center, in that tragic and indelible gap in the city's skyline, two huge beams of light were shone into the sky.

They were images of the buildings, yes, but the beams of light expressed more than that. In this work of art, light illuminated the darkness, not only of the night but of Ground Zero and the heart of darkness that wreaked such evil. The towers of light constituted an image of transcendence.

Here is a symbol fraught with possibilities for Christian artists. The towers of light encourage us to hope that artists who know transcendence, who know God and understand Him as the source and the foundation for all truth, goodness, and beauty, can step into the void and find an audience hungering and thirsting for what they can show them.

Gene Edward Veith is professor of English at Concordia University-Wisconsin. He is the culture editor of World magazine and the author of fifteen books, including Painters of Faith (Regnery, 2001), God at Work (Crossway, 2002), and Christianity in an Age of Terrorism (Concordia Publishing House, 2002).