Art and the 'right' to torture

Bruce Anderson, columnist for The Daily Mail and The Independent, tells us that "We not only have a right to use torture. We have a duty." He attempts to justify this assertion whilst implying that a society should be judged according to its cultural artefacts rather than its barbarity ("Our enjoyment of Shakespeare and Elizabethan madrigals is not blighted by Walsingham's rack-masters in the Tower of London"), and concludes with the following question: "which is the greater aesthetic affront: torture, or the destruction of the National Gallery?"
Not exactly what Marx had in mind when talking about objects acting like subjects and subjcts being reduced to objects, but its perhaps interesting to think of this in those terms - particularly if it's compared with some of the 20th Century avant-garde stuff on doing away with the notion of making 'things' and uniting art with life itself. Read Bruce and get irritated with him here, and perhaps compare and contrast with this, this, and this