The Tower of London Poppies

When I first read Jonathan Jones on the Tower of London Poppies, I felt a twinge of sympathy. I have enjoyed this amazing sight and was lucky on a couple of occasions to be allowed down into them. But I sort of knew what he meant about turning mass slaughter into a pretty, easily approachable, can-take- your-kids-to, work of art.

In fact, I had always felt something a bit similar when my own offspring were doing World War II at primary school, when the whole thing -- it seemed to me -- risked getting turned into a story of Mickey Mouse gas masks, with not a word about the gas chambers. OK, you can see why you might want to draw a veil, but it still had the effect of turning war into a cosy story of domestic displacement.

The political argument is I guess about sanitising war. If it always looks so beautiful, then we'll end up going there again and again. Let's see it as it is.

I'm not sure that the artistic or art historical argument is quite so simple, though.

I found that the whole thing took me back to the famous Roman sculpture Laocoon, the Trojan priest from Virgil's Aeneid who warned against accepting the wooden horse ("timeo Danaos..") and was punished (the reasons given differ) by being crushed to death, along with his sons, by a couple of sea serpents.

The classic problem here, raised in the eighteenth century already, is how we can enjoy looking at this work of art, when actually what is depicted is a very unpleasant murder? What is the relationship between aesthetics and pain and suffering.

There have been many answers, but the bottom line is that the correlation between the aesthetically pleasing and the morally despicable is a rather more complicated one than Jones suggests, and the sooner we get our heads round that the better. (Else we soon fall into the trap, a few steps further down the road, of assuming that bad men make/sponsor bad art . . . than which nothing, I fear, could be wronger.)

But I still think, well done Jones for raising the issue. And well done Tom Piper the artist for creating an installation that so many people have wanted to see. (If he could go on, I'd like him to do more and maybe different coloured poppies for all the dead on the other side etc)

His reply to Jones is here.