Introduction

Abstract

When composer Karlheinz Stockhausen was asked for his reactions to the September 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Towers, he infamously observed that the event was “the biggest work of art there has ever been.” The attacks were the ultimate achievement of the sublime since

people practice ten years madly, fanatically for a concert. And then die. [Hesitantly.] And that is the greatest work of art that exists for the whole Cosmos. Just imagine what happened there. There are people who are so concentrated on this single performance, and then five thousand people are driven to Resurrection. In one moment. I couldn’t do that. Compared to that, we are nothing, as composers…It is a crime, you know of course, because the people did not agree to it. They did not come to the “concert”. That is obvious. And nobody had told them: “You could be killed in the process.”²

As performances of the highest order, Stockhausen implied, the difference between sublime art and terrorist crime is only contractual: did one agree to “come to the concert”?

Being a spectator of calamities taking place in another country is a quintessentially modern experience.

—Susan Sontag¹