George Will looks at some of the art on display at the Jewish Museum (!) in New York:
"Giftgas Giftset," three replicas of Zyklon B gas canisters in the colors, and bearing the logos, of Chanel, Hermes and Tiffany's. "Prada Deathcamp" is a model of a concentration camp on cardboard from a Prada hatbox. The exhibit catalogue theorizes that the artist "dares to observe Holocaust museums and their visitors from the position of a critique of consumption." These two works ask the "irreconcilable" (does the illiterate author mean unanswerable?) question of "whether the artist is fascinated by the label-logo culture or mocking it."
It gets worse, much worse.
Death camp LEGO. Diet Coke at Buchenwald. At the Jewish Museum.
If you’ll excuse me now, I’m going to go look for some Rodin on display on the web.
One criticism lobbed at the islamic world and other dead civilisations is that they no longer have a vibrant high culture. Well folks, the material arts in the west are in trouble. Politics has now taken precedence over technique and style and aesthetics. Fortunately classical music is still alive and comparatively well, especially opera. Too bad jazz has entered the quicksands of a museum-like phase of nostalgia and stasis.
If I were tyrant of the world, I'd gather up all the oh-so-ironic, po-pomo pseudo-artists and their jars of pee and their sacks of garbage artfully arranged across designer curtains and so forth, and I'd transport them all to the middle of the Empty Quarter in Arabia (not "Saudi" Arabia -- my minions would have taken care of that little problem). There I would leave them, with one canteen apiece (filled with Evian). Then I would crank up the satellite cameras, and broadcast the fun to the world. Survivor squared.
Uh-oh -- forgot to close the tag.
