When Karlheinz Stockhausen rated the 11-S attacks as "the greatest work of art that has ever existed", the resulting public scandal was outstanding. Many of his concerts were cancelled and even his own daughter, who was a pianist at the time, announced that she would never perform under her father's surname again. Nevertheless, the relationship between art and terror was far from new or absurd. In 1757, when the real terror was yet to emerge, Edmund Burke defined the concept of sublime as a category evoking darkness and terror. It is not surprising that the term terrorism was coined precisely by this same author years later to make reference to the hygenization systems implemented in France during the Revolution. Already in the twentieth century, cultural terrorism arrived from the hand of avant-garde art movements. It was from this moment that the destruction of traditional moral, the exaltation of life and the struggle against monotony started to become a usual topic addressed by artists, who chose more aggressive and forceful attitudes to meet their requirements. Dadaists had already expressed their fascination with the great masters of murder when Breton envisioned the act of blindly firing at a crowd as the purest surreal act. However, it was not until the sixties that the influence of avant-garde art led to significant incursions into the realm of true armed conflict. The second half of this decade was marked by the outbreak of riots and occupations in May '68, as well as by the gradual incorporation of direct action and political terrorism in the midst of a cultural revolution, that not only would define the change of the artistic paradigm, but also a new way of understanding subversive action.
