The Tehran Symphony Orchestra has been wending its way around Europe performing a piece nauseatingly entitled “Peace and Friendship Symphony,” by Majid Entezami, and described - in a brilliant piece by Michael Kimmelman - as “a four-movement jeremiad of martial bombast and almost unfathomable incompetence and silliness.” As Kimmelman points out, protests did greet the orchestra in certain cities, but I’m not aware of Naomi Klein, Brian Eno, John Pilger or any other minor radical celebrity urging a boycott.

But back to Kimmelman. Noting that international conflict invariably becomes reflected in culture, he observes:

In the Soviet era, when high culture was regarded as a serious enough affair to influence geopolitical relations, symphonic music was still an obvious means of battle by proxy. Western modernism, with its stress on the new, stood against Soviet traditionalism, notwithstanding the paradox that change, as an artistic matter, ought to have been embraced by a Marxist government ostensibly endorsing a doctrine of historical progress.

Looking back, the Soviets were doomed to lose the culture war. Afraid of freedom, their arts exposed this fear. But in the minds of most listeners at the time the quality of the performances became the measure of the contest.

The difference now isn’t just that the Tehran orchestra playing a pathetic Peace and Friendship Symphony is such a far cry from Emil Gilels playing Beethoven’s Emperor concerto. More fundamentally, it’s that a tour by an anointed symphony orchestra from the other side barely registers in the Western political consciousness. In an Internet age when everyone’s supposedly savvy to crude propaganda, the presumption seems to be that the Iranian tour doesn’t even rise to the threshold of newsworthiness.

But this presumption is a result of what the American musicologist Richard Taruskin calls a common fallacy. The fallacy, he has written, consists in turning “a blind eye on the morally or politically dubious aspects of serious music,” as if “the only legitimate object of praise or censure in art” is whether it’s good or not.

“Art is not blameless,” Mr. Taruskin writes. “Art can inflict harm.”

It can — even a work like this one, whose symphonic cluelessness not incidentally suggests just how out of touch Iran may be with the West. The Tehran Symphony Orchestra used to be an exemplar of Iranian cultural excellence. The other night it was impossible not to look with pity on its players, who, having devoted their careers to mastering the classical idioms of European music, were reduced to performing this.

Do read it all.