Riot at the Concerto?

September 28, 2009 8:52 AM

What ever happened to a good old fashioned art riot?

I have a recollection that I can't find reference to now that at the debut of some piece by either Beethoven or Mozart (though evidently maybe someone else) the audience was so surprised and confused by what they heard that they simply rioted. Does anyone know what 'm talking about? I also seem to recall anecdotes about people fainting at the sight of Caravaggio's Doubting Thomas.

I can conceive that something could have defied their expectations so much that it could amount to an upset to their worldview equal to an acid trip or something, but I don't know. Why did (or would) this happen? Is it closer to the Beatles hysteria, or the anger and rejection surrounding Fountain and the Armory Show?

Are there other examples of art (of any kind) blowing peoples' minds so much that they simply flip the fuck out? Note that I'm not asking about plain old self-righteous outrage like the way people reacted to that dung-Virgin Mary painting.

Why doesn't this happen any more? Sure, people get pissed off about Damian Hirst and thousands of girls scream at Backstreet Boys (or whatever the kids are into now) concerts, but not on the order of the examples I recollect so hazily. What would it take?

posted by cmoj to media & arts (23 comments total)

The Rite of Spring
posted by azarbayejani at 8:53 AM on September 28

I think it was Rite of Spring that caused the riot.
posted by pointystick at 8:54 AM on September 28

Hmm... what about Orson Welles's radio adaptation of The War of the Worlds?

There are also accounts of strong audience reactions to early motion pictures such as The Great Train Robbery.

You might find the Wikipedia article about Succès de scandale interesting.
posted by oulipian at 9:25 AM on September 28

Excellent! What others?
posted by cmoj at 9:38 AM on September 28

There was a Metafilter FPP more than a year ago asking a very similar question: 'Why are classical music conerts so serious?'

The article it links to is great. I've always felt that the concert hall is a venue of criticism, not a museum.
posted by spamguy at 9:42 AM on September 28

Victor Hugo's play Hernani was accompanied by physical altercations among pro-Hugo and anti-Hugo audience and it probably got to riot levels at some point. Graham Robb's biography of Hugo has wonderful descriptions of it.
posted by Kattullus at 9:44 AM on September 28

The 1913 Armory Show in New York was pretty scandalous.
posted by susanvance at 9:49 AM on September 28

As for music, a recent performance of Tosca at the Met was received pretty poorly, in fact with

"...the loudest and most sustained booing in memory.

The justified anger of so many of the 3,800 fans at Monday night's gala was directed not at the singers or conductor but squarely at Swiss director Luc Bondy and his production team. Their appearance on stage at the end turned what had been a standing ovation for the cast into a raucous protest, prompting the management to bring down the curtain."

Apparently (at least according to this CBC article) it had more to do with production decisions than the performance itself.

I think this makes sense: now that we've had around a century of atonal music in the classical canon, and that we enjoy all the textural diversity of popular music today, it's harder to come up with something that will actually piss people off as much as the Rite of Spring did with those chords. What seems to piss people off more is the violation of what they feel are sacrosanct cultural artifacts. Like maybe this.

Incidentally, part of a really good episode of Radiolab provides a neat neuroscience-based narrative of what occurred at the Rite of Spring's debut.
posted by voronoi at 9:55 AM on September 28 [1 favorite]

It's hard to draw a line here because these all contain elements of both, but my feeling is that at places like the Armory Show and the performance of The Rite of Spring it was less that people were offended by morally provocative content, angry at a bad performance, or just overexcited (Woodstock '99 doesn't count) and more that they had no experience to reference in order to think about what was happening very well, so they got angry like someone having their religious convictions attacked. But yeah, that's what I'm interested in.
posted by cmoj at 10:07 AM on September 28

You do hear occasionally of people protesting public sculptures that they don't like, but often that's as much on financial grounds (they don't like tax payers money going to fund it) as artistic grounds. Does that fit your criteria?
posted by jacquilynne at 10:36 AM on September 28

It frightens me that it was now 12 years ago (felt like way more recently) but the UK Sensation Exhibition in 1997 (wiki) did cause a bit of a furore. Mostly due to the Myra Hindley painting, but also Chris Ofili's elephant dung.
posted by momentofmagnus at 10:45 AM on September 28

Wikipedia's article on dada says:

"In [1921] [Tristan] Tzara staged his Dadaist play The Gas Heart to howls of derision from the audience. When it was re-staged in 1923 in a more professional production, the play provoked a theatre riot (initiated by André Breton) that heralded the split within the movement that was to produce Surrealism."
posted by Devoidoid at 10:57 AM on September 28

The Book of Lists has a great list of art riots. This should give you a partial view.
posted by mynameisluka at 11:04 AM on September 28 [1 favorite]

While I'm a little uncertain as to whether it ever actually caused a riot, Ibsen's play "Ghosts certainly caused quite the scandal wherever it was performed. When I was in college studying theater, one of our professors once said that around the turn of the 20th century, if you were starting a new theater company with somewhat avant-garde ideals, the first play you'd probably choose would be "Ghosts" as it would be likely to cause a riot the first night and get your name in all the papers.
posted by dnash at 11:44 AM on September 28

Dylan going electric?
posted by papayaninja at 11:51 AM on September 28

Are there other examples of art (of any kind) blowing peoples' minds so much that they simply flip the fuck out? Note that I'm not asking about plain old self-righteous outrage like the way people reacted to that dung-Virgin Mary painting.

I'm not sure you should rule that kind of thing out, or Piss Christ or Robert Mapplethorpe or any other similar recent events. It seems to me that the motivating forces behind the objections are not much different from those in the past, and could be boiled down to "I don't think this is appropriate content for the kind of aesthetic criteria I'm interested in, and I'm disgusted that you're demeaning the medium!"
posted by Miko at 12:00 PM on September 28

Yale Officials Conclude Student's Shocking Claim of 'Abortion Art' Was 'Creative Fiction'
posted by R. Mutt at 12:10 PM on September 28

The Last Temptation of Christ: The Protests and the Effects on Censorship
posted by R. Mutt at 12:14 PM on September 28

CONTRETEMPS OVER "STARVING DOG ART"
posted by R. Mutt at 12:17 PM on September 28

There was apparently a riot after only the first word of the premiere of Alfred Jarry's Ubu Roi. Rank speculation on my part says that popular art no longer seeks to test the limits the way it used to, or at least the patrons that fund the avant guard no longer have the teeth for controversy.
posted by lekvar at 1:37 PM on September 28

Alex Ross's The Rest Is Noise is rife with stories like this. I'm only 5 or 6 chapters in, but it's excellent so far.

I like Miko's take on this - it's just that "demeaning the medium" with mere dissonance is likely over at this point and many attempts to engage the audience via discomfort scan as empty and hollow and pointless, however intended. (Warning: super-NSFW Mr. Show video...)
posted by mintcake! at 5:24 PM on September 28

oulipian wrote:
There are also accounts of strong audience reactions to early motion pictures such as The Great Train Robbery.

I think he might mean the Lumiére film Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat. Seems to be an urban myth with kernel of truth to it.

J.G. Ballard writes in The Kindness of Women about an exhibit of crashed cars he did in a museum that erupted into a spontaneous riot/orgy. Seems to be something of an exaggeration, but only partially, "in 1970 Ballard organised an exhibition of crashed cars at the New Arts Laboratory, simply called "Crashed Cars". The crashed vehicles were displayed without commentary, inspiring vitriolic responses and vandalism.(wiki)"

Seems to me that all of these "art riots" are embellishments of what really happened. It's good that we're not talking about bricks being thrown and arson but you have to be skeptical especially when it's the artist's themselves or their acolytes doing the reporting.
posted by Locobot at 12:43 AM on September 29

Caetano Veloso in 1968 at the early rounds of the Festival International de Canção. I wrote about it in my answer to umbú's question about musicians performing under duress. (The amusing circumstances of umbú's response is my ultimate Metafilter moment.)
posted by hydrophonic at 11:37 PM on September 30