Jonathan Meese claims a triumph of art over bureaucracy, as court finds him not guilty.

Jonathan Meese, the painter, theatre director and performance artist who has been invited to stage Parsifal in Bayreuth in 2016, was found not guilty of performing the Nazi salute as an act of public provocation. “Art has triumphed,” claimed Meese after a court in Kassel found him not guilty. “Now I am free.”

The case had been brought against Meese after he was accused of twice making a Nazi salute at an event called “Megalomania in the Art World” which took pace at Kassel University in June of last year. His lawyers had maintained that the German constitution protects artistic freedom and the court agreed that the gesture had indeed been a part of an “interview-turned-art performance”. Meese was vehement in his own defence. “Of course I am innocent. What I do on stage and in the name of art is protected by the artistic freedom clause in the German constitution”, he said at the time.

No stranger to controversy, Meese outraged an audience in Mannheim earlier in the year when he performed a simulated oral sex act on a plastic dummy of an alien,...