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THE HANDSTAND |
OCTOBER 2003 |
A Study of Artby Israel ShamirWandering on
the great peninsula of Peloponnese I drove into the
medieval-looking town of Nauplio. Its harbour is guarded
by a grey-walled islet, cosy cafes line up the
waterfront, while behind them, narrow and curvy lanes
rapidly climb up the steep mount, crowned by a Venetian
fort. City streets are fresh and dainty, and preserve the
proverbial charm of Greece. There are not many places on
the Greek mainland that so effortlessly captivate a
stranger. Greeks call it Nafplio, probably in
honour of Nafnaf the Pig. Unusual for Greece, it was
built up by Crusaders on their way to Jaffa and Acre,
sculpted by Venetians, Turks, French and Bavarians, ruled
by Duke of Athens. Nauplio was for a short while a first
capital of independent Greece, but mercifully was spared
the grim fate of Athens: it did not become a centre of
overcrowded honking urban spread. ..The Ancient Town It is a good
base to scout the plain of Argolis. On its main square,
there is an old Venetian building. It houses now the
local archaeological museum. Its collection starts with
the great Mycenaean civilisation, a child of Minoan
civilisation of Crete. This art blossomed not far away,
in the walled cities of Mycenae and Tiryns, once ruled by
the accursed Atreid kings. It is a period of wonderful
free and inspired art, with voluptuous (like Baroque
nymphs crowding the ceiling of my hotel room) figurines
of goddesses, jolly octopuses (octopi for Jennifer) on
the jars, and frescoes reminiscent of Palestinian work in
Deir el-Balach. Mycenaeans could read and write, built
castles and palaces, carved the magnificent lions above
the gate of their capital. But as one continues the tour,
all of a sudden one witnesses the great collapse. Art
disappears, and its place is taken over by bare geometric
forms. Centuries will pass from 12 c BC to 6 c BC,
until local inhabitants will regain the developed forms
of art, knowledge of writing and sophistication of old. One feels this lacuna of time while reading Odyssey. Homer composed his anachronistic masterpiece some four hundred years after the collapse, and he did not know that his heroes could write and read, and their princesses did not have to do laundry by themselves. After the collapse, one finds pieces of art strangely similar to our modern creations. In the small museum of Acropolis in Athens, there is a precise copy of Giacometti statuette, made some 2700 years ago. Geometric forms of that period are reproduced now as best examples of modern art. Thus, in the small museum of Nauplio, I found a missing piece to fit into the puzzle. Death of Art is a symptom of civilisation collapse. For another piece of the puzzle, I travelled to the other end of Europe, to the Basque capital Bilbao, where the great Jewish American family of Guggenheim built a huge museum of modern art. It is probably the biggest building erected in modern Spain, looking like a flagman of the merchant fleet entering the shore of Biscay. Its forms are unique, there are no right angles, and curves are too complicated and defy easy definition. It is a building that intends to impress and it impresses you as a spacecraft on the village street. . The museum of Modern Art in Bilbao was s
.In Amsterdam
museum I saw a collection of rotten decomposed pig
trunks. Newspapers wrote How come these
nauseating prints or rotten cadavers or cheap porn are
considered a form of art? The Modern Art predecessors,
Gustave Courbet and Edouard Manet, rebelled against
Romantic rejection of real life and real Man. The
pioneers of Modern Art, Marcel Duchamp and Kazimir
Malevich, intended to épater le bourgeois, to extend the
borders of art, to show limitless spirit of Man. But
their paradoxical joke everything placed in a
museum is art was taken with dead seriousness and
accepted for truth. Malevich:The technological side of our age advances further and further ahead, but people try to push art further and further back.....art should not advance toward abbreviation or simplification, but toward complexity...The art of naturalism is the savage's idea, the aspiration to transmit what is seen, but not to create a new form. It was a good
principle for Guggenheims, this great family that
established Modern Art museums in New York, Bilbao,
Venice. They had enough money to build a museum, they
knew what they liked, and they did not mind to become the
supreme arbiter. Guggenheim became the brand name in art.
Whatever they proclaimed as art, was art. In the
beginning, these were works of some dubious value like
abstract painting of Jackson Pollock, and
eventually we came to rotten swine, corrugated iron and
Armani suits. Art was destroyed.
The artists are still inspired by God, and still ready to build cathedrals and fill them with painting proclaiming our love of God. The Starry Night of van Gogh could be an altar-piece, Gauguin painted but Nativity and Paradise in Tahiti; and the Dove of Picasso is the one that John the Baptist saw on the banks of Jordan River. Gaudi spent years of his life to create the uncompleted Barcelona Cathedral, while on the other end of Europe, in the one-thousand-years-old first capital of Russian civilisation, Kiev, the unique St Vladimir Cathedral was built and decorated. Outside, this cathedral is quite an ordinary church in Byzantine tradition, but inside it is a miracle. All the walls and ceilings of the church are decorated with frescoes by the great painters of the fin-de-ciecle, Surikov, Nesterov, Vrubel. It is the Sistine Chapel of the Eastern Christendom, and it is almost contemporary with Malevich. The Russian
painters used the traditional scheme and subjects of
Orthodox church decoration, but their manner of painting
was new, strong, fresh. Who knows, if the Soviet
revolution of 1917 would not be so brutally
anti-Christian, the great fire of Christendom could be
lit again by the Russians. It did not happen, and the
Russian churches were destroyed, turned into warehouses,
or in case of St Vladimir Cathedral into a
Museum of Atheism. But the spirit did not die so easily,
and the noble and inspired Pilots and Sportsmen of
Deineka, a Russian Soviet painter of 1930s, and of his
Nordic contemporaries, proclaimed divinity of Man created
in Gods Image. Nowadays it is contemptuously called
the Totalitarian Art, though Stalin and Voroshilov by
Gerasimov is not more totalitarian than Napoleon by David
or Henry the Fourth by Rubens. There is no totalitarian art, but the totalitarian regime in art, totalitarian domination of single tendency in visual art connected with virtual ban of other tendencies. For Guggenheim curators and for the modern art critics, only their art is acceptable, while figurative art is ostracised. A leading figure of British art establishment, Ivan Massow, the Chairman of the Institute of Contemporary Arts, rose against this totalitarian trend. In an article in the New Statesman titled Its All Hype, he noted the totalitarian regime established by the closed gang of art curators: Totalitarian states have an official art, a chosen aesthetic that is authorized and promoted at the cost of other, competing styles. In the Soviet Union, the official art was socialist realism. Working in any other mode was considered and treated as an act of subversion. In Britain, too, we have an official art concept art and it performs an equally valuable service. It is endorsed by Downing Street, sponsored by big business and selected and exhibited by cultural tsars such as the Tates Nicholas Serota who dominate the arts scene from their crystal Kremlins. Together, they conspire both to protect their mutual investments and to defend the intellectual currency theyve invested in this art. Massow noticed
the damage it causes, for the artists are forced to fit
into Procrustean bed of this anti-art:
Thousands of young artists wait in the wings to see whether the taste arbiters will relinquish their exclusive fascination with concept art. Its a crime. We need art lovers to tell artists that theyre not obliged to reinvent themselves into creators of piles of crap, or pass their work around like samizdat. He felt that he is breaking the rules of the game: By outing this opinion in public, I realize that there will be plenty of people waiting, like Madame Defarge with her knitting needles next to the guillotine, for my head to roll into their laps. The arts establishment (what a weirdly oxymoronic phrase that is) is terrifyingly powerful and, like all centres of power, it is no friend to heterodoxy. His prediction materialised: immediately after the publication of the article he was sacked and ostracised by the British art establishment led by the Jewish cultural tsar Nicholas Serota, and by the Jewish art collector and advertising magnate, a friend of Pinochet, Thatcher and Conrad Black, Charles Saatchi. His power is unique, and an art critic, Norman Rosenthal of the BritishRoyal Academy suggested that "the Saatchis are probably the most important collectors of modern art in anywhere in the world."[i] III Does it matter that they are Jewish?, asks the annoyed reader. So there are a few Jews in the thoroughly anti-Christian, profane, totalitarian world of modern art. So what? They are still a tiny minority. Well, not really. The large
database on Jewish influence in the US, The Jewish influence in
modern art is well attended. By 1973, some estimated that
75-80% of the 2500 core "art market' personnel of
the United States - art dealers, art curators, art
critics, and art collectors -- were Jewish[ii] "Today," wrote Gerald Krefetz in 1982, ... Jews enjoy every phase of the art world: as artists, dealers, collectors, critics, curators, consultants, and patrons. In fact, the contemporary art scene has a strong Jewish flavour. In some circles, the wheelers and dealers are referred to as the Jewish mafia since they command power, prestige, and most of all, money. In 1996, Jewish art historian Eunice Lipton explained that she went into a career of an art historian in order to be in a field dominated by Jews:[iii] ".I wanted to be where Jews were -- that is, I wanted a profession that would allow me tacitly to acknowledge my Jewishness through the company I kept. The field of art history... was filled with Jews. One might even say it was shaped by them[iv] .At the Metropolitan Museum of New York, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger (former publisher of the New York Times) eventually became its chairman. He oversaw an institution in which Jews, says George Goodman, "have enriched every area of the Museum's collections, including pre-Colombian ceramics (Nathan Cummings), African art (Klaus Perls), ancient Mediterranean and Middle Easter Art (Norbert Schimmel), Old Masters Paintings (Lore and Rudolph Heinemann), French decoration arts (Belle and Sol Linsky) modern European Art (Florence May Schoenborn), modern American art (Muriel Kallis Steinberg Newman; Edith and Milton Lowenthal), Indonesian bronzes (Samuel Eilenberg), and South and Southeast Asian Art (Enid Haupt and Lita Hazen, Walter Annenberg's sisters)Throughout the Met too, galleries, rooms, theatres, and gardens are named after Jewish sponsors including Iris and B. Gerald Canter, Helene and Michael David-Weill, Lawrence and Barbara Fleishman, Howard Gilman, Leon Levy, Henry R. Kravis, Janice H. Levin, Carroll and Milton Petrie, Arthur, Mortimer, and Raymond Sacker, Laurence Tisch, and Ruth and Harold Uris. (Among the various Jewish curators at the Museum is Barbara Weinberg, head of American Paintings and Sculpture).[v] .By the 1980s, four of
the ten board members that dole out the MacArthur
Foundation "genius awards" were also Jewish;
two Jews also sat on the board of the Russell Sage
Foundation. The Kaplan Fund has also had an important
impact on the art community in divvying out awards. One
of J. M. Kaplan's daughters was the Chairman of the New
York State Arts Council.[vi] The GettyMuseum, founded
by the non-Jewish oil mogul, J. Paul Getty (and with $4
billion of funds, the richest museum on earth) has
consistently had Jews at the economic helm. In 1998,
after 17 years, Harold Williams left the presidency of
the J. Paul Getty Trust. Williams, notes George Goodman,
was "raised in a Labor Zionist home in East Los
Angeles." .The fact that Jews are so dominating in the art world is very rarely publicly acknowledged. It is forbidden -- as always for anyone, anywhere -- to discuss the subject for fear of being branded "anti-Semitic." Typically, as example, an entire 1989 academic volume on the "Sociology of the Arts" fails to mention Jews as sociological entity in the modern art dynamic. There are analyses of art galleries, "artist groups," art patrons, and art audiences, broken down into gender, age, income, occupation, and even "racial and ethnic minorities." We can find that, negligibly, "blacks, Orientals, and persons of Spanish origin constitute about 7% of the art audience," but there is nothing whatsoever about Jews, even their own percentage of that "art audience," let alone how many art galleries they own, museums they direct, and articles they generate about art value.[ix] Why did it
happen? What is the reason of Jewish success in the field
of Modern Art? It is not due to great achievements of
Jewish artists: they are quite modest, and despite the PR
support of Jewish art collectors, curators and critics,
they are well within what could be expected for a Still, the Jews were extremely ill equipped for their conquest of Olympus. For many generations, Jews never entered churches and hardly ever saw paintings. They were conditioned to reject image as part of their rejection of idols. In the course of two thousand year long selection process, visual gifs of Jews were not developed, as opposed to abilities to learn, argue and convince honed to perfection in Talmudic environment. Rejection of Christ this main fountain of creativity is even deeper reason. There is no visual art or poetry outside of God, at best, a godless person can imitate art. For this reason, Jews are, as a rule, poor painters and sculptors. (Chagall and Modigliani embraced Christ, and Chagall made the stained glass of Chartres). While their mastery of word and ideology is very high (well above average of 100, at 130), their average visual ability is only 75, extremely low. One can consider it a scientific proof of no art without Christ. Indeed until recently there were no important Jewish painters or sculptors. The Jewish temple was supposedly built by Phoenicians and Greeks, and it had a very few images. Even illumination of medieval Jewish manuscripts was usually done by non-Jewish artists, who made very obvious errors trying to copy Jewish letters. Jewish success in the Art world is amazing. If the Olympic Sports committee would consist of handicapped persons, and a fair share of sports commentators would be lame, and even some winners of the games would be lame, we would have reason to be astonished. But probably, looking at it carefully we would find that the main Olympic sport is Run in Bags, or chess. Visually handicapped Jews created a similar anomaly that of non-visual conceptual art. A piece of conceptual art is describable and explainable. It is a narration. Tracey Emins Unmade bed fully describes the object, while another beauty, Alighiero Boettis sculpture Yearly Lamp, a light bulb that illuminated itself only once every twelve months, is fully described by this description. Preparation of these items places no demand on artistic abilities. They can be done by anybody. Such art is perfectly within Jewish abilities. Moreover, Jews with their good ability to produce ideas and read iconography will surely succeed in it. Thus, the Run in Bags, the kind of sport that began as a new entry into Olympic games, eventually is promoted to the position of an all-important one. We can easily dismiss demonising talk of the Jews who destroy art in order to break Aryan spirit. Jews bend art to fit their abilities, in order to succeed in this difficult (for them) occupation. Breaking (or not) the Aryan spirit is quite irrelevant for them. While there are wealthy Jews able to buy art and provide for an artist who makes what they like, while there are witty Jews in the media that approve of the art Jews like (one that is easy to tell about), they would create bias in favour of the art they like and understand. But how did they get into this position in the first place? How the lame runners of our example have got their opening into the Olympic committee? Despite their wealth and media domination, the Jews would not make it, but for a few previous developments. .. Photography is to painting as pornography to real women. Both create an illusion of real thing, but leave a lingering emptiness. In the long run, the real thing suffers. Pornography undid many happy unions. Reproduction of art conditioned us to view uninspiring beauty. It is difficult to view a painting of Mona Lisa without instinctively comparing it to its endless reproductions. In a way, the modern art was a botched response to reproductions, for an artist needs to attract attention of blasé viewers. Photography was an important stepping stone to demise of art. Great paintings were reproduced in albums, and caused no great uplifting in the hearts. Purely materialistic vision of the age precluded even to referring to the vast difference between original and copy. Painting lost its uniqueness. 2. Museums. Removal of paintings and sculptures from the churches into museums was fatal for the West. A painting lost its context, it was de-contextualised and de-constructed. Paintings and sculptures of Annunciation and Passion were given into the custody of the new priesthood, the curators and critics. It undermined the living practice of faith: despoiled of their precious art, empty churches did not attract visitors. De-contextualisation of art was done under cover of not-too-sophisticated sophisms. God needs no paintings, true faith needs no adornment, art will be safe in museums etc. As if the organisers of mass confiscation wished to strengthen faith, as if they wished to bring people to the church!... It reminds me the favourite Jewish sentence so frequently used: It (whatever you are doing or saying) is undermining the Palestinian cause, as if they wished to help Palestinians. In France, churches lost its riches in the beginning of the 20th century, and since that time both faith and art (after a short splash) went downhill. Need to protect art from thieves was frequently used as a pretext for undermining it. It was similar to locking princess away in a Maiden Tower of so many legends. The Tower protected her, to be sure, but it turned her into an old spinster. The chef doevres of the human spirit were removed from the churches to museum, - to jail. People go and visit the jailed dear friend for a while, and it brings profit to jailers, while the churches brought no profit; but eventually they forget the jailed man, and it is even more profitable, for spirit interferes with profit. 3.
De-sacralisation of art. It was achieved after removal of
art into museums. From this point of view, while Bilbao
Guggenheim is quite repulsive, its mother institution is
even worse. New York Guggenheim Museum of Modern Art
carefully mixes sacral art and junk. Exposition is done
in a way saying: they are the same. Sacred images of
Brazilian Virgins are placed next to rude idols, or to
erotica. Indeed, pictures of Christ and His Mother are
plentiful in the modern art. But as a rule, they are
aimed to profane their image. Made of faeces, or
presented in indecent poses, they are part of the war on
art and Christ. A photograph of crucifix in a container
of urine, entitled Piss Christ was exhibited in the
Whitney Museum which is headed by a great friend of Ariel
Sharon, a member of Mega, Leonard Lauder. Recently I saw
in Stockholm an image of Christ presented as the poster
for the week (or was it the month?) of gay pride: a
crucified black man was erotically embraced by a white
muscular Nordic man. If one wants to shock people one can follow the example of a small Russian city that placed the icon of Christ on its coat of arms. All Moscow-based American correspondents visited the dashing rebels and asked them whether they are not afraid of Jews. Probably that is the only sacrilege that still has some shocking value. Alternatively, one can envisage a model of the Wailing Wall with urinals in public toilet. It is impossible to rule whether the Jewish participation (surely very active) in the processes of de-uniquisation, de-contextualisation and de-sacralisation of art was decisive. Consider a city with a big oil company which supplied the citizens with oil. There was also a tiny kerosene shop that provided a few diehards with the stuff in an old-fashioned way. It was impossible even to compare the two companies. But eventually the big company was streamlined, broken to pieces to enliven competition surely in the best interests of the customers, - forced to tender some of its operations, and was undermined. The tiny kerosene shop received the same status as the once great corporation, and when the corporations plant was burned down, it rose to unexpected greatness. Was it achieved by the kerosene sellers, or did they enjoy the windfall? Now we come to a stumbling block of conspiracy. Can one believe that the Jews, ordinary Cohens and Levys, actually conspired to remove art from churches, develop photography and place sacred images in juxtaposition with profane things in order to kill art and the European civilisation? Should we consider a possibility of Jewish conspiracy against art as a part of the warfare against spirit? In order to
unravel this mystery we shall introduce a concept of a
Group Interest. Groups (classes and nations) have
interests which do not coincide with the sum of interests
of its individual members. Moreover, individual members
are not always aware of this Group Interest. Let us
consider Mammon personification of capitalist
Class Interest. A capitalist may wish to sell drinking
water, but Mammon wants to poison all water in order to
force everybody to buy drinking water. A capitalist may
build the mall, Mammon wants to destroy the world outside
the mall, for the outside world interferes with the only
meaningful occupation, shopping. While a separate
capitalist can do a lot of damage, his Class Interest,
Mammon, is more dangerous, nay ruinous for the world.
Mammon will try to eliminate every distraction to
shopping, be it churches, art, forests, rivers, seaside,
fresh air, mountains. An individual capitalist probably
is not aware that he follows his Class Interest when he
dumps chemical poison waste into a river. .For Mammonites, Art is a distraction from the most important occupation, adoration of Mammon. Mammonite reviews of Art concentrate on price of Art. Recent discussion of a possible fate of the Pink Madonna by Raphael in the NY Times and in the Guardian was limited to the price tag and ownership. A modern Russian writer Victor Pelevin described[x] an exhibition of receipts, where the masterpieces are left in crates in the storehouse, while the walls of the exhibition hall are adorned by an art dealer-issued documents asserting that the painting was bought by the private collector for, say, 15 million dollars. It is the most advanced tendency in design, monetarist minimalism, says a character in the novel. Indeed, judging by many art reviews, such an exhibition would do nicely, as it keeps the most relevant items, price tag and ownership of the piece of art. For Mammonites, every art exhibition is a monetarist minimalist exhibition, as they notice only the bottom line - price tag. Mother of a Jewish American Princess is supposed to meet her potential son-in-law wearing mink replete with price tag, says a cruel Jewish joke. In the modern art, mink is removed, but the tag is preserved. Thus the Capitalist Class Interest supports Conceptual Art; moreover, it turns every kind of art into Conceptual art. For Jews,
their Group Interest lays in undermining visual art for
they cant compete in it. Even deeper group interest
of Jews is to undermine Christianity, their main enemy.
We see this interest satisfied now by relentless attack
on Mel Gibson who dared to produce a film about Christ.
Not about Jesus a kind Jewish Rabbi, neither about
whoring Jeshu from jolly Nazareth but about God
Who Died on the Cross. As sacrality in Europe is
unavoidably Christian, profanation of art is certainly
within Jewish Group Interests. It does not mean the Jews,
or even some Jews understand that they act in their own
group interests. .However, they did it before, as well, for the Eastern Christianity experienced a similar development twelve hundred years ago. The Jews were prominent in the great tragedy of Byzantine art, the iconoclasm. In the beautiful and spacious Church of Hagia Sophia, the arguably greatest achievement of the Eastern Orthodox Christianity, lovingly restored in 20th century by Turkish masters, in vain one seeks mosaics of Justinian and Theodora copied at Ravenna. One finds only relatively late mosaics and frescoes. Everywhere, with a very few exclusions, the sacred images of that fruitful period were destroyed, when the rejection of images became the official doctrine of the Empire. They survived in far away places: in St Catherine of Mt Sinai, in remote monasteries, to haunt us with their sublime beauty and with feeling of irreparable loss. The contemporary writers leave us no doubt: Jews (a powerful community in these days as nowadays) were extremely active in promoting this concept. However, this comparison brings some hope, for after two hundred years of iconoclasm, people got tired of boring non-spiritual churches, and brought the visual art back. Until now, the Church celebrates Sunday of Orthodoxy, when the Art Came Back. We also can do it. The sacred images should be returned to their rightful place, in the church. All of them, the delightful Annunciation by van Eyck from Washington Museum, and Trinity by Rublev in Moscow Museum of Old Russian Art, should be re-contextualised. We should not be cruel to collectors: in my opinion, Saatchi may keep all formaldehyde swine he likes. And while at
it, other cultural properties should be re-contextualised
as well. Let us return the mosaics of Pompeii to their
place from the boring museum of Naples, and the Greek
marbles to Athens, let the treasures of Mesopotamia go
back to Iraq, and the statues of Hisham Palace back to
Jericho. Let us empty [i] FALLON, p. 335 This and following data is quoted by the great compendium of Jewish activities, www.jewishtribalreview.org with much gratitude. [ii] BURNHAM, p. 25. [iii] RUBIN- DURSKY, p. 289 [iv] LIPTON, p. 285 [v] GOODMAN, #2, p. 73 [vi] CHRISTOPHER, p. 121 [vii] KREFETZ, p. 153 [viii] GOODMAN, #2, p. 142 [ix] FOSTER/BLAU, 1989 [x]Pelevin, Babylon, Faber and Faber 1999. |
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