Sunday evening I received a school-wide email attempting to place Robert Crumb in context to a situation in which the university's true goal seems to remove him from his past. The Modlin Center for the Arts does an excellent job bringing in wonderful performing guests from all over the world. But one thing that would be helpful for the future is more information about why some guests are surrounded by controversy.
When thinking of providing students controversial topics and ideas, we cannot forget the history from which those ideas originate. Recall the upset that occurred from students at Columbia University only two years ago when the school decided to invite Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as a keynote speaker at its world leadership forum. The guests to whom a university extends an honorable invitation reflect upon how people view the university as a whole. For each guest invited, the university needs to carefully consider and balance the negatives. In this scenario, the negatives have caused hurt and disgust among the student body. Certainly we cannot ignore controversial issues as a university, but we can decide who we are paying to raise those issues. There are many ways to address the issues of misogyny, sexism and racism without giving our financial support and ticket sales to someone who has shown himself staunchly in agreement with all three.
Richard Wagner, a famous German composer of the nineteenth century, brought music performance and opera to completely new levels. He created new compositional techniques and instruments and even built an opera house which stands as one of the most visited in the modern world. Clearly, like Crumb, Wagner was very professionally accomplished and revolutionary. He was also very controversial. In his published works and correspondence, Wagner was incredibly anti-Semitic and frequently attacked his Jewish contemporaries merely for their religion. Wagner labeled Mendelssohn and Meyerbeer, two Jewish-German composers (also extremely accomplished and studied frequently today) as a detriment to Germany because of their faith. For this reason, Adolf Hitler used Wagner as a prime example of a German composer during World War II and played Wagnerian operas in concentration camps to further diminish morale. Since 1948, the year of the establishment of Israel, Wagner has only been performed in an Israeli concert hall once, and the performance was reasonably surrounded by controversy.
Is it possible to have absolute art? This is a question about which art historians and music historians spend their lives discussing. The answer is rarely a simple "yes." In this way Dean Newcomb is correct; we should put Crumb in context, but as someone hoping to study interactions between music and society for the rest of my life, I would like to politely encourage the university to look at Crumb's entire career of context and not isolate this new book as the sole context surrounding his controversy.
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