An ongoing outrage that made headlines for a day and has already disappeared in the continuous shuffle of newsworthy events, the controversial exhibit "Mirroring Evil: Nazi Imagery/Recent Art" at the Jewish Museum in New York is a testament to the sad state of modern art.
The exhibit includes a set of 145 movie stars such as Robert Duvall, Clint Eastwood, George C. Scott, Gregory Peck and others in Nazi uniforms, collages that combine pictures of Nazi officers and naked women, a doctored picture of concentration camp prisoners showing the artist holding a can of Diet Coke and concentration camp models built from a Prada hatbox and Legos.
The display by 13 artists is designed to provoke controversy about modern consumer culture by linking it to images of the Holocaust. In doing so, not only have these artists failed to clearly make their point, they have incensed people around the country by presenting the Holocaust as something reducible to a mere "symbol of oppression" to advance their own agendas.
"Fashion, like fascism, is about loss of identity," said artist Tom Sachs in a New York Times interview, explaining that his concentration camp model built from a Prada box is not really about the Holocaust, but about fashion.
Opposing the concept of fashion as put forth by modern consumer culture is nothing new. But by raising the issue in this way, any chance at positive discussion of that issue is lost. No matter what Prada, an Italian fashion company, might have done to deserve vilification, it certainly has done nothing to make a comparison to genocide anything but insulting.
Even worse is the Lego concentration camp by Polish artist Zbigniew Libera, which depicts Holocaust victims as smiling skeletons trapped behind gray Lego walls and wire. Far from succeeding as an indictment of the Lego Group, which was tricked into donating the blocks, these models show how easy it has become for some people to dissociate themselves from historical reality.
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Just as the horror of the Holocaust cannot be adequately explained by numbers and statistics, plastic toy models encourage the viewer to distance themselves from the very real human suffering of it. If the goal for us as a society is to keep alive the memories of the Holocaust so that it will never be repeated, this is not the way to go about it.
Imagine for a moment the outcry that would be raised if an elementary school student built a Lego concentration camp and brought it in for show and tell. The poor kid would spend the rest of his school career in counseling and doped up on Ritalin. But an adult artist does it, and we must respect it as art.
How must it feel to be a survivor of a death camp and see your misery simplified into children's building blocks? To realize that some artist feels you can be compared to just another toy skeleton? What must it be like for those who lost their mothers, fathers, siblings, and friends?
In the United States, the right of freedom of expression is guaranteed. No art should be censored, even if it is in unbelievably bad taste. On the other hand, not all artwork is deserving of public display or praise, and especially not of public funds.
Artwork that trivializes tragedies like the Holocaust does nothing to help prevent it from happening again. Nor does it comfort those who have suffered or provide insight to those who were not there.
If the Holocaust has fallen so far out of our consciousness that it is nothing more than an abstract icon we can twist to support any political message, then we have failed to preserve the memory of its true nature.
by Craig A. Butler
Daily Lobo Columnist
