THE ART WORLD


 
"On the face of it, art history seemed a gentile profession. For one thing,
the study of Christian art was its center. In addition, there was an ancient Jewish injunction against
making graven images. But the fact is, the field was filled with Jews. One might
even say it was shaped by them. Art history is
characterized in this century by studies in connoisseurship, formalist analysis,
 the study of iconography and iconology, and social analyses. Jews have been prominent in all categories."
Eunice Lipton,
in Rubin-Dorsky/Fishkin. People of the Book. Thirty Scholars Reflect on Their Jewish Identities. Press of American Studies Association, 1996



"In Baltimore, Miami, Atlanta, and a host of other cities, cultural institutions are increasingly dependent on Jewish support."
Charles Silberman,
A Certain People, Summit Books, 1985, p. 214-215


"Some eyebrows may have been raised at the awareness of Baltimore's Jewish 'Art Mafia.' At the
time, Arnold Lehman was director of the Baltimore Musem
of Art, Sergio Commissiona was music director of the
Baltimore Symphony (in Meyerhoff Hall), and Frederick Lazarus IV, an arts
administrator, was president of the Maryland Institute College of Art. Also,
Herbert Kessler, a medievalist ... , chaired the well-regarded art history department at John Hopkins [University]."
George Goodman,
A New Jewish Elite: Curators, Directors and Benefactors of American Art Museums. Modern Judaism, February 1998, p. 123



"A member of the [Jewish] Warburg banking family single-handedly started up the field of art history ... [CANTOR, p. 271] ... All the art history departments in the world are direct descendants of Aby Warburg's Institute (moved from London in 1932 to escape the Nazis) and his great Jewish disciple, Erwin Panofsky. Is it anamalous that a Jew would have been so creative in the study of art that was so little cultivated in Jewish tradition? All the more that a liberated Jew should pursue art history. But one can see a Judaizing tendency in Warburg's method of art historical criticism. The picture is studied for its 'iconology,' its pattern of ideas illustrating textual passages. Art is therby approached in hermeneutic fashion, again recalling Talmudic exegesis, rather than for its aesthetic content. Yet the most significant aspect of Warburg's development in art history is the demonstration that market capitalism could embrace and fund a purely cultural and academic operation. The distinct equality of capital was not its materialism, but its liquidity, the fungible capactiy of capital to transform into any commodity, including art and humanities literature that represents a dynamic power in society. Aby Warburg's historical and critical mastery of art was structurally the same as his brother's master in their international bank of money and its investment potential. The transormative interaction between art and capital is central to the nature of the market economy."
Norman Cantor,
The Sacred Chain: The History of the Jews, HarperCollins, 1994, p. 271

 

 "It is my contention that the art world of the 1980s represented a kind of renaissance
for Jewish American artists who came of age in that decade. The list of young Jewish American
artists who took center stage in the 80's is long --
early in the decade we might think of Barbara Kruger, Laurie Simmons,
Sherrie Levine, R.M. Fischer, Donald Sultan, Julian Schnabel, and David
Salle. Later, the work of Ross Bleckner, Terry Winters,
Haim Steinbach, and Meyer Vaisman come to the fore ... What originally motivated
me to explore this subject [of growing Jewish artist prominence]
was the strange fact that there has been an inexplicable
silence surrounding it. Especially in this era of multicultural awareness, it is
surprising, to say the least, that no one has mentioned this
phenomenon ... One possible reason for
this silence about a Jewish artist renaissance in the 80's is that at the
same time a great fluorescence of Jewish influence in the areas of
philanthropy, business, finance and the bastions of high society was
taking place ... By the 1980s ... in cities with large Jewish populations, like
New York, Jews had largely replaced the older WASP elite as standard bearers of
social  power and prestige in the evolving American
postwar ethnic meritocracy."
Thus a new and yet unexamined social paradigm arose. Jews ... [who] had
championed the marginal culture of Modernism had suddenly become the
pillar of the American establishment. At the same time, a new
of Jewish artists was emerging whose work was collected as often as not by
Jews in the cultural elite as part of a continuing tradition Jewish support for contemporary art."
art critic
Peter Halley,
self-defined as 'half-Jewish,' The Eighties and Jewishness, The New Art Examiner, June 1997, p. 26-28




Jewish author Howard Jacobson wrote in 1993 about his experiences with prominent New York City art critic Peter Schjeldhal:
'I came to New York to be Jewish,' [Schjeldhal] once told me:
'Did you make it?'
'No.'
'What were you before?'
'Porcelain-sink Lutheran.'
'And now? Since you haven't made it across as one of us?'
He paused. He wasn't sure he want to be THAT un-Jewish.
'A certain transformation has occurred; but a certain gulf remains.'
It takes me a little while to put it together -- the fact that just about every gallery/space/loft we go into is run by a Jew. This isn't Jewish how I like it. This is slow-drawl, camp Jewish, retreating, high-toned, not very sense-of-humorish Jewish. The pallid women gallery-owners whose walls and wine we absorb are also Jewish.'"
Howard Jacobson,
Roots Schmoots. Journey Among Jews. The Overlook Press, NY, 1993, 1995, p. 84-85



By 1973, some art observers estimated that 75-80% of the 2,500 core "art market" personnel -- art dealers, art curators, art critics and art collectors -- were Jewish.
Sophy Burnham,
The Art Crowd, David MacKay Co., NY, 1973, p. 25


"[Jewish lesbian artist Marina Vainshtein has] tattoos of graphic Holocaust images over most of her body. On her
upper back, the central image represents a train transport carrying Jewish prisoners in
striped uniforms towards waiting ovens ... It was ... in high school [in Los
Angeles] that Vainshtein became obsessed with
Holocaust literature ... Vainshtein's tatoos include a violin player ... surrounded by
hanging corpses, anguished faces and Zyklon B, the
killing agent in the gas chambers. The screaming faces of prisoners being
gassed are tattooed on one breast."
Dora Apel,
The Tattooed Jew. New Art Examiner, June 1997, p. 12-


"The chimney [in a painting by Jewish artist R. B. Kitaj] functions as an indictment of Christianity. Hence Jewish identity in Kitaj's painting is achieved in opposition to Christianity ... Innocense and guilt: Jew and Gentile."
Juliet Steyn,
The Jew: Assumptions
of Identity, Cassell, London and New York, 1999


"In the past twenty years I've sold at auction thousands of Nazi relics and documents. And nearly always such sales have evoked criticism, harrowing experiences, or even threats on my life ... Today the big threat to me is not from bombs [Hamilton once had a bomb threat for having a Hitler photo for sale in his gallery window] but from collectors who are stampeding me and other autograph dealers in their frenzy to stock up on letters and documents of Hitler and his henchmen before the price goes through the roof. A letter of Hitler's is now worth five of Churchill's and ten of Franklin D. Roosevelt's. Who's in the Third Reich rat race? The Germans are buying. The British are buying. But most of all it's Jewish collectors in America. They big with aliases or anagrams, from behind pillars or half-closed doors, or signal the auctioneer furtively. Their names are top secret. Is it just the fascination of evil and violence? Maybe. But as one Jewish collector explained to me: 'It's like having the head of the hunter on the wall instead of the hunted.' One of the outstanding Nazi collections in America was formed by the late Philip D. Sang, whose collection of Judaica I recently appraised for presentation to Brandeis University. I helped Sang to build his superb assemblage of Jewish letters and documents and I helped him to gather his huge and important Nazi collection. Among the historic items that came from my sales were the Nazi top-secret plan for the invasion of Holland and Belgium and Mussolini's own copy of Nietzche's Man and Superman, annotated with Il Duce's own ideas for implementing the philosphers's vision. Another Nazi collector, famed for his physical education courses, once told me that his entire family was wiped out in an Austrian concentration camp during the Holocaust. Yet I never met any man so enthralled with the Nazis, especially the more brutal of them. He liked to ensconce his villains in spectacular frames."
Charles Hamilton.. Auction Madness. An Uncensored Look Behind the Velvet Drapes of the Great Auction Houses, Everest House, Publishers, New York, 1981,
p. 172, 174



The Times: Another Dupe in Charles Saatchi's Con Game. New York Observer, November 15, 1999
[Those mentioned below: lawyer Floyd Abrams, collector Charles Saatchi, and museum director Arnold Lehman are all Jewish, as is -- to his credit --the author of this article, Hilton Kramer]
"As expected, a Federal judge has rejected Mayor Rudolph Giuliani’s attempt to withhold funds from the Brooklyn Museum of Art for exhibiting the odious Sensation exhibition. Once again, First Amendment fundamentalist Floyd Abrams has made the world a safer place for the market in the foulest varieties of obscene expression ... What is now beyond question is that the entire project of bringing this shabby inventory from the Saatchi Collection to Brooklyn has from the outset been what even The [New York] Times, after publishing some 60 or more news stories, editorials and reviews in ardent defense of the exhibition, has finally been obliged to concede is 'an ethically dubious enterprise' ... Because of the Sensation scandal, all the world now knows exactly how this market-manipulation venture works. Mr. Saatchi first commissions work that is guaranteed to cause outrage, then promotes it as his latest 'discoveries,' then importunes once-respectable institutions like the Royal Academy of Art or the Tate Gallery to endorse it, and then makes a killing in the art-auction market. This is what now passes for 'avant-garde' art in London–and, of course, in New York–and it has proved to be a highly successful business enterprise. Thanks to the total lack of conscience, tact and taste which Arnold L. Lehman, the director of the Brooklyn Museum, brought to the organization, the financing and the promotion of the Sensation show, all art museums that traffic in this particular vein of 'cutting-edge' hucksterism have also suffered a significant loss in public confidence. The sheer quantity of cynical hokum that it has long been standard practice for our art institutions to invoke in defense of whatever horror or inanities the art traders are currently promoting as avant-garde is no longer as persuasive as it once was for anyone not involved in the market. We haven’t witnessed the death throes of this phenomenon yet, but some of the other institutional defenses of Sensation have shown signs of moral fatigue and a distinct diminution of mental acuity."

A New Jewish Elite: Curators, Directors and Benefactors of American Art Museums. Modern Judaism, 1998, 18.1, p. 119-152
[To access this article, go to google.com and type in for your search: George Goodwin jewish art. When the link comes up, select the cached version.]
"Presently, there are several Jews in the highest ranks of American museum professionals. Michael Heyman is the Smithsonian's secretary (or chief administrator). Elsewhere in Washington, Alan Shestack is deputy director of the National Gallery of Art, Neil Benezra is chief curator of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden (where Stephen Weil recently retired as deputy director), and Stephen Ostrow is curator of prints and drawings at the Library of Congress. Beyond the federal domain, David Levy is director of the Corcoran Gallery." This article goes on and on like this, in a detailed look at Jewish prominence in the art world throughout the country. There are actually two separate articles on this subject by Goodwin in the Modern Judaism journal.

MOMA Board Member Quits After Indiscreet Purchase.
The Art Newspaper
[Great Britain], June 5, 2000
"The publisher and billionaire [Jewish] art collector Samuel I. (Si) Newhouse has quit the board of trustees of the Museum of Modern Art in New York after buying a 1913 Cubist Picasso painting that was deaccessioned from the museum’s collection. Newhouse, who controls Conde Nast Publications, Random House, and a chain of newspapers, had been on the MoMA board for twenty-seven years. A museum spokesman said that Newhouse had violated a museum policy that bans trustees from buying works from the institution. In this case, the 1913 'Man with guitar' was sold from the collection to raise funds for new acquisitions. The guidelines of the Association of Art Museum Directors discourage the selling of art from museum collections except for the purpose of buying similar works of art. The museum appears to have been acting within those rules in this deal. The painting was sold by the museum to an art dealer, said to be Larry Gagosian (from whom Newhouse has purchased many paintings in the past) and then sold to Newhouse for $10 million. New York State requires that museums which receive government funds deaccession works at public auction, a law established after the Metropolitan Museum of Art surprised donors with the sale of a number of paintings in the Seventies. The Guggenheim’s lucrative sale at Sotheby’s of works by Kandinsky, Modigliani and others in 1990 to buy the Panza di Biuma collection of minimal and conceptual art was condemned as unethical. Yet private museums, like the Guggenheim and MoMA, are permitted by New York State law and the AAMD to sell their works privately."

The ARTnews 200 Top Collectors, by Milton Esterow. ARTnews, Summer 201
The owner of this influential newspaper, Esterow, is Jewish as are at least eight of the "Top Ten" art collector families listed here as a tease to an off-line article. The Jewish ones are Debbie and Leon Black, Edythe and Eli Broad, Doris and Donald Fisher, Ronnie and Samuel Heyman, Marie-Josee and Henry R. Kravis, Evelyn and Leonard Lauder, Jo Carole and Ronald S. Lauder, and Stephen Wynn.

Helmut Newton: The Master. The Difficult World of the Greatest Fashion Photographer Who Ever Lived. The Independent [Great Britain], May 9, 2001
"To radical feminists, [Jewish photographer Helmut] Newton is the Antichrist. This is the man who photographed a woman on all fours with a saddle on her back, and another sitting in her underwear on an unmade bed, with a gun in her mouth ... Newton's vision is fuelled by sex, status, power and, above all, voyeurism ­ there are often extras in his pictures who gaze at the women centre-stage. Those are, of course, also the things that make fashion tick. Small wonder, then, that much of the photographer's most successful imagery has become far more famous than the garments he has chosen to photograph ... Newton's influence is everywhere ... In the Sixties and Seventies, Newton's decadent vision may have been labelled "porno chic", but today the rest of the world has finally caught up with him and it's just plain chic. There is barely a stylist, photographer or designer working in fashion today who can fail to acknowledge Newton as an influence."

The Frog Prince. The Independent, [Great Britain], January 4, 2000
"Serge Gainsbourg [born Lucien Ginzburg] ... is still most famous in Britain for his number one Je t'aime moi non plus: the scandalous anthem which was in the British charts 30 years ago. He and [Jane] Birkin simulated their lovemaking so effectively that the single was banned by the BBC and formally condemned by the Vatican ... Gainsbourg is the greatest popular musician France has ever produced ... Echoes of his favourite technique, of murmuring profanities against a delicate and beautiful harmony, can be heard in many contemporary records, not least the later work of Leonard Cohen ... Gainsbourg appeared to relish the onset of old age as giving him licence for the kind of appalling behaviour normally permitted to youth. Towards the end of his life, the singer's media appearances became ritual provocations: in one television broadcast, he subjected a veteran paratrooper - horrified by Gainsbourg's dub version of the Marseillaise - to a torrent of obscenities, pausing only occasionally, to inflate condoms. On another notorious live show, sharing a platform with a young Whitney Houston, Gainsbourg, then 58, turned to the presenter Michel Drucker and declared, in English, 'I want to fuck her.'"

An Avant-Garde Impresario: Julien Levy. Art in America. March 1999
"Julien Levy, the promoter of Surrealism and pioneering New York art dealer of the 1930s and '40s, was the subject of a recent exhibition that wove together art works and archival materials ... . Although best remembered as the preeminent American dealer of Surrealism, Levy first exhibited and sold a range of European and American photographs ... [Salvadore] Dali would become central to Levy's stable ... In terms of conceptual innovation and creative energy, Julien Levy and his gallery are central to the history of American art between the wars."

Modligliani: The Pure Bohemian. Kirkus Reviews, October 1, 1991
"Modigliani, explains British biographer [Elizabeth Fry] Rose, was the product of an upper-class Jewish- Italian family. After art studies in Livorno, Florence, and Venice, where he spent more time in cafes and brothels than in class, he arrived in Paris in 1906, seeking fame and fortune. Within weeks, the somber reality of poverty set in--moving from seedy hotel to seedy hotel, he wound up living in a wooden shack in Montmartre. There, and later in Montparnasse, he met many of the foremost artists, writers, and 'characters' of the day, including Picasso, Soutine, Utrillo, Cocteau, Hans Arp, and Fernand L‚ger. Because of his success with women, Modigliani had easy access to free models ('Women of a beauty worth painting or sculpting often seem encumbered by their clothes,' he said). Rose seems torn between downplaying what she refers to as the 'Modigliani myth' and relating dozens of stories that have served to create that myth. Included are accounts of how Modigliani danced wildly in the moonlight with a famous courtesan; of how one of his first collectors was a senior police official who first met the painter when he was jailed for drunkenness; and of how the artist's only one-man gallery show was closed 'for indecency' the day it opened."

Stealing Beauty. Los Angeles, July 2000
"[Jeffrey] Hirsch, who had initially been hired as editor of UCLA Magazine and head of campus publications in April 1994 and was now in charge of overseeing an array of university magazines, marketing projects and annual reports, had an incredibly diligent and time-consuming secret life. In four years, he had generated armloads of falsified documents to acquire hundreds of pieces of art and other prize possessions ... The tally was actually a staggering $480,000, used to buy paintings, photographs, fine furniture, rare books and assorted knickknacks, all of which were hidden in a public self-storage space that even his wife of 11 years didn't know about."

Kahlomania. The age.com. [Australia], July 4, 2001
"Overshadowed by her husband - famous muralist Diego Rivera - during her lifetime, [Frida] Kahlo [whose father was Jewish] is now a global cult figure. The feisty woman with the striking stare and tempestuous love-life has inspired ballets, operas, books, biography, films and plays. Dozens, if not hundreds, of websites pay homage. A religion, 'Kahloism,' worships her as the one, true god. 'Kahlomania' is about to hit Australia: a new play about her opens tonight in Melbourne, a major exhibition will be launched in the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra next week, a Hollywood movie will hit Australian screens in December ... Frida Kahlo is not only arguably the world's most famous female artist, but also one commanding the highest prices. Last year, a Kahlo self-portrait painted in 1929 fetched $10 million, creating a record for Latin American art and for a female artist. A Kahlo the size of a chicken's egg was sold last November by Sotheby's for $400,000 ... Memorabilia including a letter opener, dried flowers, a watch and ribbons went for $110,000 in a sale of Kahlo curios, prompting a Latin American art expert in New York to observe that people were vying for shreds of Kahlo's garments."

Vanity Fare. Phoenix New Times. June 7, 2001
"Mirror, mirror on the wall, who's the fairest of them all? Apparently, it's high-profile art collectors Jacques and Natasha Gelman, judging from all the glitzy portraits commissioned from famous Mexican artists that now grace the walls of the Phoenix Art Museum as part of 'Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera and Twentieth-Century Mexican Art: The Jacques and Natasha Gelman Collection' ... Contemporary acquisitions -- which are, overall, of better quality and more engaging than the work of the older Mexican art legends -- have been expertly guided by longtime Gelman friend Robert Littman, ex-director of Mexico City's now-defunct Centro Cultural/Arte Contemporaneo (referred to popularly as the Centro Cultural). As president of the Vergel Foundation, which is responsible for carrying on the Gelman legacy, Littman seems to possess an infallible eye, which cannot be said for the Gelmans' original aesthetic vision ... Both [Jacques and Natasha] were Jewish, married in 1941 and [they] remained in Mexico because of the Second World War ... Always nattily attired and fur-coat-swathed, Jacques and Natasha were the stereotypical film producer and glamorous socialite spouse. To cement their status in Mexican high society, in 1943, Jacques commissioned Diego Rivera to paint Natasha's portrait, which appears in the exhibition. Though the most famous of the Mexican mural painters at the time, Rivera often paid the rent by doing portraits of wealthy socialites ... Frida Kahlo's Natasha portrait of 1943 captures the woman, crowned with sausage curls al modo and draped in a fur stole, with a strangely flat effect ... To anyone familiar with Mexican art history, the Gelman exhibition is not a well-balanced overview of Mexican art at mid-century ... [it is] a classically status-driven, gotta-be-better-than-the-Gomezes compilation reflecting one type of art collector's psychic preoccupation with memorializing himself and notable public figures with which he has socialized. Frankly, it's one more befitting a newly moneyed, 18th-century Dutch burgher than a discerning, visionary collector seeking emerging and mid-career artists' best and most enduring work."

National Collection Needs a Major Lucien Freud. The Age, Australia
"Australia's national art collection needed a major Lucien Freud painting, National Portrait Gallery director Andrew Sayers said today. The National Gallery of Australia (NGA) is planning to buy Lucien Freud's painting After Cezanne from the artist for $8 million - if it can raise the last $1 million. This would make it the NGA's most expensive painting ... Mr Sayers said the Art Gallery of South Australia showed extraordinary foresight and bought a Freud in 1950 and the Art Gallery of Western Australia had a painting of a nude man holding a rat ... Mr Sayers said Freud, the 78-year-old grandson of psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, was not a household name but was an artist's artist."

Eli Langer. Mercer Union Digital Archives, 1979-1995
[A compilation of art gallery press releases and local news articles about a controversial 1993 Toronto art exhibition by Jewish artist Eli Langer]
"Eli Langer's show of eight paintings and various small pencil drawings is much talked about in Toronto art circles these days -- much talked about because no one knows what to make of it. In a community that sets few limits when it comes to explicitness, Langer's subject matter breaks one of the last taboos: the sexuality of children. The paintings, gorgeously rendered in a duo toned chiaroscuro of red and black, show children and adults in various forms of sexual play. A naked child sits on the lap of a naked man who might be her grandfather. A masked intruder climbs through a window into a bedroom where a naked girl straddles the neck of an adult and very erect man who lies on the bed ... Let it be said then, that they are horrible -- both the paintings and the pencil drawings which feature a dreary catalogue of don'ts (children masturbating, performing fellatio or buggering each other). The whole show is a self-conscious, juvenile prodding of its own excrement." -- Globe and Mail. Langer is Jewish. And "his father is an amateur Holocaust historian." [Toronto Life, 1-20-94, p. A21]

Police Obscenity Squad Raids Saatchi Gallery.
Guardian [London], March 10, 2001
"The Saatchi gallery has been raided by officers from Scotland Yard's obscene publications unit and warned that they will return to seize pictures in its current exhibition, I am a Camera, unless the offending images are removed before the gallery opens its doors to the public again. The Metropolitan police confirmed last night that officers had visited the gallery twice this week after three complaints under anti-child pornography legislation and a report was being forward to the crown prosecution service. The exhibition features the work of a group of artists and photographers selected by Charles Saatchi himself and taken from his personal collection of photographs and paintings. It has been running for eight weeks and has been reviewed in most of the broadsheet papers and magazines from the Tatler to the Telegraph, without any public complaints to the gallery."

I'll Be Your Mirror. [Book Review of Nan Goldin's work; Amazon.com]
"Based on an exhibition of the same title at the Whitney Museum of American Art this collection of more than 300 pictures documents the alternative culture of Nan Goldin's friends and acquaintances in the arty bohemian substrata of Manhattan. Goldin turns her camera outward to record transvestites carousing in downtown clubs and the social impact of AIDS and drugs; and inward to look with unblinking intimacy at her friends, her lovers of both sexes, and herself. She records her boyfriend masturbating. She shows him on the toilet. She shows her own battered face in a mirror after he beats her up. She traces the decline and death of her friend Cookie Mueller. Goldin has created a stark record of her urban demi-monde."

Nan Goldin's Retrospective and Recovery: Framing Feminism, AIDS, and Addiction. Chapter 6. [This scholarly analysis of Nan Goldin's work, apparantly posted at Syracuse University, floats -- alas -- uncredited in cyberspace]
"It may be correct to partially attribute renewed interest in [Nan] Goldin's career to the currently fashionable status of Goldin’s subject matter over the past 25 years: 'the urban demimonde, the world of drag queens and slum goddesses, of Lower East Side nightclubbers and Tokyo teen-agers in black rubber.' Goldin's work has even been a model for the 'fashionable addiction' that I discussed previously. The popular mainstreaming of the transgressive fringes of society (who are the stock subjects of Goldin’s work) in the 'drug chic' school of fashion photography has liberally borrowed from Goldin's exemplary documentary-style realism. It became common in the late '90s for young fashion photographers to request that their lab recreate Goldin’s style of printing and, in fact, Nan Goldin herself shot publicity photos for the Italian fashion firm Matsuda. Even the bruised eyes of sleepless junkies and battered women that have been the touchstone of Goldin's photography for over two decades became a 'look' in high fashion makeup application."

Dangerous Curves. The Advocate, 1999
"[Lisa] Cholodenko found inspiration all around her when she moved to New York. Originally a Valley Girl—from Encino, Calif., no less—she came of age via college in San Francisco and a few years of globe-trotting, including a stint with her then-girlfriend in Israel. She even did time in Los Angeles, working as an assistant editor and slowly moving up the Hollywood ladder until she began to feel trapped, read about 'the new queer cinema' in New York, and vowed to try her luck ... She was inspired by the retrospective of Nan Goldin photographs at the Whitney. She wondered why so many lesbians she knew suddenly had access to cheap, clean heroin and thought it was hip. 'I’m too uptight to go there,' the 33-year-old filmmaker demurs when asked whether she herself got into the heroin experience. She got hooked instead on her fascination with the whole scene. The lesbian art world, drug culture, interpersonal power plays, careerism—all became material for her screenplay ... The main model for Lucy [the main character in her film High Art] is more likely the late photographer Diane Arbus. 'I was reading her biography at that time,' Cholodenko notes. 'All the stuff about Lucy’s rich Jewish family, her early success and later isolation from the fashion world, that all came from my view of Arbus.' As for Goldin, at last report Cholodenko was planning to invite the famed photographer to see High Art for herself."

Still Life: Jews, Photography, Memory.
National Foundation for Jewish Culture, December 1999
"George Gilbert ... independently published his groundbreaking survey "The Illustrated Worldwide Who's Who of Jews in Photography" in 1997, which documents 550 Jews who developed the art, science, and business of photography, such as Ben Shahn, Alfred Steiglitz, Robert Frank, Diane Arbus, Garry Winograd, and Annie Leibovitz, to name merely a few ... The lucid directness of photography has allowed Jews to record the transformation of individual identity while preserving communal memory." [There are many, many, many well-known Jewish photographers. Here's a few: Jacques Lowe (John F. Kennedy's personal photographer), Richard Avedon (superstar portrait photographer of the fashion world and celebrities), Weegee (a New York City ambulance chaser who has been reinvented as a famous "artist"), etc.]

After 'Dinner Party,' Judy Chicago Feasts on Judaism.
Jewish Bulletin of San Francisco. July 14, 1996
"She is a woman of names. Born, Judy Cohen. Married, Judy Gerowitz. Self-designated, Judy Chicago. But the name that fills her eyes with joy today is the one her grandmother called her -- Yudit Sipke. Twenty years ago, Chicago -- controversial creator of the acclaimed feminist art installation 'The Dinner Party' -- wouldn't have offered the public this particular morsel. Her first autobiography, released in 1975, detailed Chicago's gender politics, not her religious heritage. Judaism 'wasn't even a subject. I can't believe I hadn't thought about it,' Chicago reflected during a Bay Area visit last month that included an appearance at the Marin Jewish Community Center. The recently released sequel, 'Beyond the Flower: The Autobiography of a Feminist Artist,' includes sections about her Jewish upbringing, her return to the fold and her eight-year, multimedia project on the Holocaust ... Even now, the artist can't exactly explain why she underwent a religious transformation later in life. But she can describe how it happened. In the mid-1980s, she met her future husband, Donald Woodman. Her two previous husbands also had been Jewish. But this time, something was different. The pair decided to have a Jewish wedding. When they began studying the traditions with Renewal-movement Rabbi Lynn Gottlieb, they realized the depth of their hunger for Judaism." [CONTEXT: "There are in halakhic {Jewish religious law} literature [that has] repeated groupings of women in categories with slaves, minors, fools, deaf mutes, and the like which are so offensive as to take one's breath away ... The issue is an [anti-woman] attitude which was deeply and systematically imbued into Judaism." Gerald Skolnick, Domestic Violence and the Jewish Community, Sh'ma, January 19, 1996, p. 3-4"]

Shock Value. Jerome Witkin's Paintings Bear Witness to the Holocaust in Graphic Detail, Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles, April 21, 2000
"Jerome Witkin, perhaps the greatest figurative painter alive, is ... most renown[ed] for his Holocaust works, which have received an 'almost reverential' response from the curators and critics who have visited the show ... the painter's Jewish father, who had abandoned the family when the twins were 3, attempted suicide and began to live, homeless, on the streets. His last words to Jerome were, 'Go to hell.' At the age of 50, his father was found, dead, in a diner; he had suffered a heart attack after enduring a vicious beating by thugs. At the funeral, Jerome stood at the graveside and realized he had hardly known his father. 'I wasn't listening to anything except my head, which kept repeating, Who was this man?' he recalls. To find out, Witkin began exploring his Jewish roots, avidly reading volumes on Jewish history, anti-Semitism and the Holocaust. His interest culminated in a series of Holocaust-themed paintings."

So Many Women, So Little Time. Salon.com, June 7, 2001
"Jan Saudek doesn't mind admitting it: He likes a woman with a fat ass. Unlike fellow erotic photographers such as Helmut Newton, whose Euro-babe models seem to subsist on a diet of champagne and heroin, Saudek, 66, happily dives head first into the mountains and valleys of jiggling flesh proffered by his mostly Czech trollops. Plus-size beauties are a recurring theme in his work. Sometimes they bend over while Saudek spanks their glorious, globelike keisters with handfuls of switches. Or they might spank each other, skip rope or simply crouch nude on all fours with wildflowers crowning their heads and saggy green socks on their feet. Indeed, in one of the Prague maestro's favorite hand-tinted, sepia prints, titled 'The Burden,' Saudek stands nearly naked with his back to the camera while his former wife, Maria, sits atop his shoulders -- her creamy, gargantuan derrière apparently having swallowed Saudek from the neck up. Looking at that woman's divine posterior, bathed as it is in blue, one fantasizes about drowning in the folds of her massive sex ... The enormously prolific Saudek has been wildly popular in Europe since the '70s ... Saudek's father, a Jewish banker, survived the concentration camp Theresienstadt, the only brother in his family to do so."

Richard Avedon. Slate.com, December 17, 1999
"[Richard] Avedon has done much to revive the portrait as a central genre of photographic art. His only serious rival is Irving Penn, and his epigones (whether they admit it or not) include everyone from Robert Mapplethorpe to Annie Leibovitz. Among his precursors are Julia Margaret Cameron, the great 19th-century British portraitist, and August Sander, who set out to compile a comprehensive visual record of German life between the world wars. But while Avedon's portraits clearly represent his bid for artistic immortality--a bid he has assiduously devoted much of the past decade to mounting--they represent only one facet of his work ... Avedon's ubiquity, the extraordinary variety of subjects and styles, and his willingness to shoot album covers, posters, and advertisements as well as museum-worthy black-bordered prints, have occasionally offended purists. Hilton Kramer, for instance, called Avedon's 1994 retrospective at the Whitney (which produced a gorgeous book titled Evidence: 1944-1994) 'the ultimate capitulation to celebrity, money and fashion at the expense of art.'"

Las Vegas Spotlight: Backers of Guggenheim, Hermitage Museum Undaunted by Criticism. Gaming Magazine, 2001
"Here we are in Las Vegas, a city where, until a few years ago, the term 'culture' referred mostly to the faux marble in the casino bathrooms, and the venerable Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation is preparing to open not one but two museums. That irony, and the concept of 'my, how things change', is not lost on the projects' backers. 'The fact that it is based in Las Vegas is creating something of a stir,' said Thomas Krens [Jewish?], director of the Guggenheim foundation. That said, 'nowhere do the rules say you can't come to Las Vegas.' 'Evolution is what a place like Las Vegas is all about,' said Sheldon Adelson, chairman of the board of Las Vegas Sands Inc., developers of The Venetian, site of the new museums. 'Las Vegas keeps doing things that amaze other people, and it keeps re-inventing itself.' Krens and Adelson were speaking at a Jewish Federation meeting and press conference to introduce the project ... The museum will open with 'The Art of the Motorcycle,' which Krens said was 'hugely successful' at the Guggenheims in New York and Bilbao, Spain ... Criticism of the Guggenheim entering the Las Vegas market has come from various fronts. An article in The Independent of London was headlined: 'Finest art museums join forces to open an outpost in the cultural desert of Las Vegas' and suggested the museums follow Strip tradition and use fakes. But the same article ascribed much of the criticism to 'art snobs'and quoted Mikhail Piotrovsky, director of the Hermitage, as saying, 'Las Vegas is America.'" [Las Vegas, of course is largely Jewish-founded --see Jewish Influence in Popular Culture]

Judge Allows Suit Over 15M in Nazi Loot.
New York Daily News, September 6, 2001
"The secretive [Jewish] Wildenstein clan, owners of an art fortune worth billions, suffered a legal setback yesterday in a battle over eight rare religious manuscripts allegedly looted by the Nazis during World War II. A state judge refused to dismiss a lawsuit brought against the Wildenstein Gallery in Manhattan by the heirs of Alphonse Kann, a French Jew whose vast art collection was pillaged by Hitler's henchmen after he fled to England in 1940. The works, 15th, 16th and 17th century Christian prayer books from the French aristocracy, are worth an estimated $15 million. The suit was filed in 1999 by Francis Warin, Kann's great-nephew, who wants the manuscripts returned. 'The Nazi inventory establishes the Kann family's ownership,' said Stephen Somerstein, Warin's lawyer. 'It's clearly identified as having been taken from the Kann mansion by the Nazis in 1940.' Hyman Schafer, lawyer for the Wildensteins, said the suit exceeded the statute of limitations under French law."

In Depth Art News: "Gemma Levine": Portrait Photographer 25 Years, absolutearts.com, [exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery, London]
"Gemma Levine is one of Britain's leading portrait photographers, with a marvellous capacity for capturing the character of her subjects ... Her career in photography was initiated by a commission from [Jewish publishing mogul] George Weidenfeld to take photographs for two books in Israel collaborating with [prime ministers] Moshe Dayan and Golda Meir.

E.M. Gombrich, Author and Theorist Who Defined Art History Is Dead at 92,
New York Times, November 7, 2001
"Ernst Gombrich, an author of panoramic erudition and probably the world's best-known art historian thanks to his best-selling 'Story of Art,' died on Saturday in London, where he had lived since moving from his native Vienna in 1936 ... Like Meyer Schapiro, the other great art historian of his generation, Mr. Gombrich was a lucid writer."

Estee Lauder Heir Opens Own Art Museum,
Virtual New York [from UPI], November 16, 2001
"The Neue Galerie Museum for German and Austrian Art opened to the public Friday, the latest addition to New York's museum mile on upper Fifth Avenue. The museum is the pet project of cosmetics heir Ronald Lauder, former U.S. Ambassador to Austria and a onetime aspirant to the New York mayoralty. It reflects his passion for Central European art produced during the early years of the 20th century as a revolt against academic art. Visitors to the Neue Galerie view avant-garde art from the twilight years of the Hohenzollern-Hapsburg empires and the years between the two World Wars in a magnificent French Louis XIII-style brick and limestone mansion with a view of Central Park. It was the home of Grace Wilson Vanderbilt, the uncrowned queen of American society, until her death in 1952. The mansion at the corner of 86th Street was owned by the Yivo Institute for Jewish studies when Lauder and his project partner, the late art dealer Serge Sabarsky, purchased it for $9 million six years ago. It took four years and more than $10 million more to renovate the structure as a museum, restoring the polished marble and paneled interiors with gilt detailing to their original elegance ... Lauder has given some of his collection, including an important Klimt painting, to the New York's Museum of Modern Art of which he is board chairman."

Two Brothers from Montreal Make Good -- and Waves,
[Jewish] Forward, November 30, 2001
"Canada's Jewish community kvelled when, at the turn of the new century, Montreal-born, look-alike brothers Victor and Robert Rabinovitch were named to head two of the most important government-owned cultural institutions in the country. The brainy, 50-something brothers are sons of a lower middle-class Jewish family. Younger brother Victor is president of the Canadian Museum of Civilization Corp., the country's largest and busiest museum, while his older brother Robert is president of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. Their appointments, the apex of careers built largely in the federal civil service, were 'a source of naches [pride] for the entire Jewish community,'' said Irving Abella, a Toronto historian and former president of the Canadian Jewish Congress. 'They are energetic and dedicated, and never tried to hide their Jewish background.'"

Yizhak Rabin - The Original Famous Painting, ebay.com, March 1, 2002
[For sale] "The original famous painting of ISRAEL Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin that was gunned down by an ultra-nationalist assassin because is peace policy, the painting was located a few meters from where the assassin took place,on the painting there are the original inscriptions that the people wrote, expressing there feelings, there is a date on the painting,dated a few days after the murder. the painting size is 98*144 inch, it is possible to get a personal designating from the artist ...Opening bid $500,000."

L.A. Museums: Saved by the Jews,
Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles, August 16, 2002
"The art scene in Los Angeles, like its popular culture counterpart of film and television, is known by insiders as having a very significant Jewish presence. Drift through the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) and it is difficult to avoid noticing the prevalence of Jewish names. It is well-known that the city’s Museum of Contemporary Art, a smaller modern art museum that opened its doors in 1983, owes its existence largely to the efforts of the late Marcia Weisman — she had been the guiding force behind the idea, the fundraising, and the support of local artists — and its recent renovation to a $5 million contribution from David Geffen of Dreamworks. When we add the Armand Hammer Museum, (opened in 1990 and now run by UCLA,) and the Norton Simon Museum (1974), and the Getty Center’s Jewish Presidents (past and present) we might conclude that without the involvement of L.A.’s Jewish population, art in the city would be greatly diminished if not invisible. On one level, of course, none of this is new. Jews have historically been collectors, producers and consumers of art. Culture matters. But there is a fork in the road here. The cultural life of the city, not just its Jewish community, is being shaped by this new — Jewish — cultural elite ... By playing a central role today in the shaping of our national culture, Jews have moved inside the society, and in the process, have helped America become partly Jewish. It is a dramatic step towards inclusion."

Bringing Dance to Prayer: Activist Wins ‘Genius’ Grant,
Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Oct. 1, 2002
"'Liz Lerman is the only true genius I know,” declares Rabbi Daniel Zemel of Washington’s Temple Micah, 'and I know some very, very intelligent people.' It’s taken the rest of the world a little longer to accept what the Reform rabbi believed in his heart from the moment he met the activist choreographer more than a decade ago. Choreographer, dancer, community organizer, teacher and now public persona, Lerman last week received a five-year MacArthur Fellowship for $500,000, a prize that carries with it the public recognition of genius status. The fellowship, which comes with no strings attached, is given to 20 to 30 individuals annually. Those selected in the highly secretive process demonstrate outstanding creative and intellectual achievement in a diversity of fields ... Much of her work has been deeply rooted in exploring Jewish themes and issues, like her 1991 piece 'The Good Jew?' which pressed the issue of being Jewish enough in a contemporary society ... Growing up in a Reform Jewish household in Milwaukee, Lerman found that passion for social activism in her father, who worked with the Anti-Defamation League ... When Lerman joined the board of Synagogue 2000, the national collective of Jewish organizations and rabbis that is re-envisioning the synagogue for the 21st century, she had worked her way into establishment Judaism without forgoing her roots or her cutting-edge philosophy that dance can — and must — make a difference."

Spying can be art says ex-Mossad agent,
Times of India (Reuters), October 30, 2002
"A good spy is like a good artist, rising above the mundane to touch excellence, says the former Israeli secret service agent who captured Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann. In his 73 years Peter Malkin, one-time operations chief at the Israeli intelligence service Mossad, has accomplished enough to fill three lifetimes. 'If you do things well, they become artistic,' he said during a visit to Budapest to promote the Hungarian translation of his book, Eichmann in my Hands. 'In every field, there are some who do it in an artistic way and others who do it as a job,' said the man born Zvi Malchin in British Palestine in 1929. 'If you do it perfectly, in can be artistic, whether it's spying or painting.' Painting brought Malkin international recognition, but he can now reveal some of his Mossad past, for which he was twice awarded the Prime Minister's Medal, Israel's highest honour."

Poet's Winding Path Leads to a Job as a Foundation President,
Chronicle of Philanthropy, October 17, 2002
"Edward Hirsch, a prize-winning poet and the beneficiary of prodigious amounts of philanthropic support, will become president of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation in January. Mr. Hirsch has been awarded a 'genius' fellowship from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Rome Prize, which allowed him to live and write in Rome for a year, and a fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation, among others. Over the last five years, he has served on the foundation's selection committee, which chooses 180 or so fellows out of a field of several thousand ... He is active in three national poetry groups, the Academy of American Poets, the Poetry Society of America, and Poet's House."

Behind a Century of Photos, Was There a Jewish Eye?,
The New York Times, July 7, 2002
"To be a great photographer, Garry Winogrand liked to claim during the 1970's, it was first of all necessary to be Jewish. The best ones, in his opinion - past and present, himself included, naturally - shared this birthright. Jewish photographers by his definition were nervy, ironic, disruptive of artistic norms and proud outsiders. Eugène Atget, he happily argued (on no genealogical grounds), must have been Jewish because his photographs of French life on the tattered fringes seemed so Jewish in spirit. As generalizations go, Winogrand's semi-serious barroom boast has a lot of evidence to back it up. In no other visual art form except cinema over the last 100 years were Jews such a shaping force. From first decade to last, in fine art, reportage, portraiture, fashion and especially street photography, a staggering number of influential figures have been Jewish. To list just a few: Alfred Stieglitz, Paul Strand, Man Ray, El Lissitzky, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, André Kertesz, Brassaï, Erich Saloman, Martin Munkasci, Robert Capa, Alfred Eisenstaedt, Lisette Model, Helen Levitt, Weegee, Aaron Siskind, Margaret Bourke-White, Irving Penn, Richard Avedon, Arnold Newman, Robert Frank, William Klein, Elliott Erwitt, Winogrand, Diane Arbus, Lee Friedlander, Annie Liebovitz, Mary Ellen Mark, Joel Meyerowitz and Nan Goldin. Winogrand was by no means alone in observing that a vast number of the outstanding 20th-century photographers were Jewish. Over the years, a few curators have noted the fact in private, as have some Jewish photographers themselves. 'I've had this conversation with many of my colleagues,' said Mark Haven, a photographer who teaches at the Rochester Institute of Technology. 'It's hard not to notice it. And it's hard to talk about. People can accuse you of being an ethnic chauvinist ... [Jewish critic Max Kozloff] suggests, for example, that photographs of New York taken by Jews show a sensibility distinct from those by non-Jews. It's not clear who will feel more insulted by some of his ideas: Jewish photographers who have never regarded themselves as such, or non-Jewish photographers who, in Mr. Kozloff's opinion, have usually evidenced in their work a more stable and also a less soulful vision of the city ... . He seizes on a quote in The New Yorker last year by the photographer William Klein, who posited an opposition between what he calls "goyish photography" (the landscape school of Edward Weston and Ansel Adams) and 'Jewish photography' ('funky' urbanists like Weegee and Arbus). Mr. Kozloff accepts this division of schools and argues that images of New York by Jewish photographers during the middle of the century tend to reveal a unique "social tension," which is usually not found in the work of their non-Jewish colleagues."

Picture this: Jews, Jews everywhere?,
Jewish World Review, July 25, 2002
"I'm just crazy about New York: Capital of Photography, published by Yale University Press, in conjunction with the Jewish Museum, where a show featuring these photos is now on display. I can't imagine a more exciting collection of street photography about a city I find of boundless interest ... The problem is that the [Jewish] author of the monograph, art critic Max Kozloff, who also happens to have assembled the show, has other notions. The majority of the photos he's chosen were taken by Jewish photographers, and he has attempted to prove that there is a particular Jewish perspective at work in the way New York has been visualized over the last 100 years or so. What's fascinating is how all the evidence he's gathered helps undo his thesis. Doubtless, there are great, great Jewish street photographers, and many are represented here: Helen Levitt, Ruth Orkin, William Klein, Lisette Model, Garry Winogrand and Weegee, perhaps most of all. ... What, then, does the Jewish perspective consist of? Kozloff says that Jewish photographers bring a 'social tension' to their work ... . Kozloff also wants to make a case for Jewish photographers as great street photographers, and this is doubtless so. But his compilation shows that the real pioneers in this genre -- except perhaps for Andre Kertesz (who isn't included) -- were all non-Jews, and that later Jewish photographers drew strength and style from them. Perhaps the most important of the pioneers is Walker Evans, and I would say that if this collection proves anything, it is that almost all of these artists came out from under his artistic overcoat."

Embalmed Tramp Found in Artist's Studio,
Reuters, October 14, 2002
"A British artist kept the preserved body of a tramp at his studio for nearly 20 years, The Times newspaper said Saturday. The embalmed body of Edwin McKenzie was discovered in the workshop of his former close friend Plymouth artist Robert Lenkiewicz who [was Jewish and] himself died this summer. McKenzie had been preserved and hidden in 1984 ... Lenkiewicz often used vagrants as models for his paintings, which often carried an anti-establishment message." [ALSO, at robertlenkiewcz.com: "In 1983 Lenkiewicz exhibited Project 16. This project attempted to survey as wide a range as possible of human activities relating to sexual behaviour. He attempted to do this seriously without attention to the law ... Heterosexual behaviour, homosexual behaviour, auto-erotic behaviour, bestiality, even necrophilia are commonplace in our society and most societies, and characterise more than 50% of all human entertainments. It is interesting that when the authorities visited the Exhibition to consider closure, the paedophilia section went entirely unnoticed ... The project attempted to demonstrate that there was no end to human creativity, that loneliness combined with human passion could animate a hoover to far more gratifying potentials than one's wife. The project seemed to indicate that all sexual behaviour was auto-erotic; from marriage partners to strangers' underwear."]

Judaism in Music,
by Richard Wagner, 1850
The Wagner Library
[Wagner, the great German composer, is widely condemned in Jewish literature as an antisemite]
"According to the present constitution of this world, the Jew in truth is already more than emancipate: he rules, and will rule, so long as Money remains the power before which all our doings and our dealings lose their force. That the historical adversity of the Jews and the rapacious rawness of Christian-German potentates have brought this power within the hands of Israel's sons—this needs no argument of ours to prove. That the impossibility of carrying farther any natural, any 'necessary' and truly beauteous thing, upon the basis of that stage whereat the evolution of our arts has now arrived, and without a total alteration of that basis—that this has also brought the public Art-taste of our time between the busy fingers of the Jew, however, is the matter whose grounds we here have to consider somewhat closer. What their thralls had toiled and moiled to pay the liege-lords of the Roman and the Medieval world, to-day is turned to money by the Jew: who thinks of noticing that the guileless-looking scrap of paper is slimy with the blood of countless generations? What the heroes of the arts, with untold strain consuming lief and life, have wrested from the art-fiend of two millennia of misery, to-day the Jew converts into an art-bazaar (Kunstwaarenwechsel): who sees it in the mannered bricabrac, that it is glued together by the hallowed brow-sweat of the Genius of two thousand years?— We have no need to first substantiate the be-Jewing of modern art; it springs to the eye, and thrusts upon the senses, of itself. Much too far afield, again, should we have to fare, did we undertake to explain this phenomenon by a demonstration of the character of our art-history itself. But if emancipation from the yoke of Judaism appears to us the greatest of necessities, we must hold it weighty above all to prove our forces for this war of liberation."

A Case for Jefferson
Harrison loves my country too,
But wants it all made over new.
He's Freudian Viennese by night.
By day he's Marxian Muscovite.
It isn't because he's Russian Jew.
He's Puritan Yankee through and through.
He dotes on Saturday pork and beans.
But his mind is hardly out of his teens:
With him the love of country means
Blowing it all to smithereens
And having it all made over new.
-- Robert Frost, from Steeple Bush, Henry Holt, 1947

Vulgar tastes in art,
by Theodore Dalrymple, National Post (Canada), November 4, 2002
"There was a dreary inevitability about the choice of a painting entitled Arsewoman in Wonderland as one of the four finalists for this year's Turner Prize, Britain's foremost annual competition in the visual arts. By their consistent reward of the scatological and the vulgar, the judges have repeatedly demonstrated that they are more concerned to establish their reputation for broadmindedness and lack of prudery than to encourage art of true value sub specie aeternitatis ... This vulgarity, which now pervades the whole of British life, is of ideological origin. To be vulgar establishes one's identification with and sympathy for the proletariat: though in the case of art, the identification and sympathy is not reciprocated, since the modern British proletariat considers attendance at an art gallery on a par with, indeed a prognostic indicator of, homosexuality and child-molestation. However, the proletariat that the artist wishes to join is not the real, existing proletariat, certainly not in its financial attributes, but one of a sub-Marxist fantasy. Radical chic, it seems, springs eterna l... But it is precisely because we have learned to view everything through a prism of political correctness that vulgarity has triumphed, and the British art scene is dominated by -- well, rich, callow bastards." [See: Art  links, or, for a more in-depth view, Modern Art, or "vulgarity," or the Marxist "proletarian view."]

Poet regrets naming Baraka N.J. laureate,
NJ.com (New Jersey), November 10, 2002
"Anti-Semite. Liar. Ignorant. D-plus poet. The man who helped select contentious New Jersey poet laureate Amiri Baraka as his successor now uses those words to describe him. Gerald Stern says he regrets that he recommended Baraka for the honor of poet laureate, but he's not sure the title should be taken away from him, as some are demanding. 'I made a mistake," Stern said. 'I'm sorry I appointed him. There were many other poets we could have appointed. We did it out of good will. We thought it was important to select a prominent New Jersey figure who represents the black community' ... Baraka has been accused of anti-Semitism because his poem implies that Israel had prior knowledge of the Sept. 11 attacks, and Gov. James E. McGreevey has called for his resignation. But Baraka has refused to step down and has repeatedly denied he is anti-Semitic. 'He claims he is not an anti-Semite, but of course that is bull,' said Stern, who is Jewish' ... 'He's full of (expletive) and he's an evil son of a (expletive) for starting that myth here. I think he is an (expletive). The poem is not even good. I give it a D-plus or a C-minus grade as a poem. In terms of its truth, I give it an F-minus' ... Stern, a Lambertville resident, was appointed by former Gov. Christie Whitman as the state's first poet laureate in 2000 after a committee of poets nominated him ... . 'I'm nervous about censorship," he said. "But I'm not going to be the first person in line to defend his right to free speech. I'll let people who worry about the First Amendment do that.'"
Question for book award judges: Is this reading really necessary? Michael Kinsley confessed that he didn't read the 402 books he was supposed to evaluate. High literary crime or a case for Evelyn Wood's seven-day course?,
Philly.com, December 3, 2002
"Who says you can't judge a book by its cover? A National Book Awards judge just did it - possibly with hundreds of books - and he's practically bragging. Late last month, former Slate editor-in-chief Michael Kinsley, a National Book Awards judge this year in nonfiction, rocked the sedate world of book prizes. He wittily informed readers in a Slate piece that he hadn't read many of the books assigned to him. He suggested that he hadn't even read every page of the book to which his committee gave the prize on Nov. 20: the latest mammoth volume in Robert Caro's gargantuan LBJ biography ... In his sardonic piece about the awards experience, Kinsley declared that his motives for becoming a judge after that 'were ignoble - mainly vanity and a desire for free books.' Kinsley joked that his taking on the task was 'especially hypocritical because two things I have long claimed to oppose in principle are books and awards. Nonfiction books are especially regrettable. There is too much nonfiction going on in the world already without writers adding to it.' When the 402 books he was expected to read over six months started arriving, he panicked. He admitted that solely by 'bold and fearless procrastination,' and 'without my having to crack a single spine,' he cut the pile from 402 to under 50. In the closest thing to justifying his behavior within a mischievous, lighthearted piece, Kinsley asserted that awards were 'the purest example of gratuitous or superfluous meritocracy,' that comparing different sorts of nonfiction reeked of 'inherent arbitrariness' ... Even in his latest Slate piece, Kinsley warns readers: '[D]on't expect total honesty.'" [RELATED ARTICLE: The man who won the award that Kinsley (who is Jewish) judged -- without reading too much -- was also Jewish -- Robert Caro. Also, at least 2 of the 4 National Book Award winners noted in the following piece, plus a special "lifteime achievement" winner, were Jewish: Ruth Stone, Robert Caro, and Philip Roth] A First Novel Gets National Book Award, by Dinitia Smith, from: New York Times, November 21, 2002
"The National Book Award for Fiction went to a relatively unknown author, Julia Glass, last night for her first novel ... After being a finalist twice before for the nonfiction award, Robert A. Caro finally won it last night for 'Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson" (Knopf) ... The poetry award went to Ruth Stone, 87, for her eighth collection ... Nancy Farmer won the Young People's Literature award ... [Host Steve] Martin also introduced Philip Roth, who received the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. Noting that Mr. Roth had won two National Book Awards himself, Mr. Martin wondered aloud, 'If he's so great, where's his Golden Globe, his Emmy, his house's layout in In Style magazine?' ... In his speech he praised the American language and the freedom that America gave his Jewish parents in Newark. He decried the self-division of Americans into subgroups, like 'American Jewish.' Those labels, he said, are 'self-limiting.'"

U.S. Deports Dozens of Israelis,
Los Angeles Times (from Associated Press, March 6, 2002
"Authorities have arrested and deported since early last year dozens of young Israelis who represented themselves as art students in efforts to gain access to restricted buildings and homes, U.S. officials said. The Israelis tried to get inside sensitive federal office buildings and the homes of government employees, the officials said. A draft report from the Drug Enforcement Administration -- which first characterized the activities as suspicious -- said the youths' actions 'may well be an organized intelligence-gathering activity.' Immigration officials deported the Israelis for visa violations; no criminal espionage charges were filed ... The arrests, made in an unspecified number of major U.S. cities from California to Florida, came amid public warnings from U.S. intelligence agencies about suspicious behavior by people posing as Israeli art students and 'attempting to bypass facility security and enter federal buildings' ... The DEA report said a majority of the students questioned by U.S. investigators acknowledged having served in units of the Israeli military specializing in military intelligence, electronic signals interception or explosive ordnance. The DEA said one person questioned was the son of a two-star Israeli general, one had served as the bodyguard to the head of the Israeli Army and another served in a Patriot missile unit. Most Israeli men and women are conscripted into their nation's military service at age 18. A Justice Department official, who also asked not to be identified, said investigators have been aware of some 'alleged linkage' between the students and alleged espionage activities in the United States since early 2001, and said authorities have made arrests in Dallas, Chicago, San Diego and in south Florida."

Spat over painting sparks debate on free speech for Vancouver Jews,
Jewish Telegraphic Agency, December 19, 2002
"The relationship between art and Jewish sensitivities can be a rocky one ... Vancouver artist Jeannie Kamins says she is facing a different kind of censorship. Kamins’ art is being shown at the Jewish Community Center of Greater Vancouver. But she recently had to remove one of her pieces, a portrait of Canadian Parliament member Svend Robinson, after members of the Jewish community told the JCC that they found it offensive. Kamins’ 'offense' is that Robinson is a fierce critic of Israeli policy toward the Palestinians. During an April 2002 visit to the West Bank, Robinson appeared on television confronting Israeli soldiers as he attempted to reach the besieged headquarters of Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat. Robinson later declared that the Israeli government and military were 'guilty of torture and murder.' Kamins said she painted Robinson’s portrait in 1992 'as part of a series of portraits of people who I feel have integrity, political commitment and who are controversial.' She added that she included Robinson’s portrait in the exhibition not to offend, but because it represented one of her best works. 'It’s outrageous that I should be judged by what I put in when it was not a political piece, but a picture of a man sitting on a bench. This is not free speech,' Kamins said ... Claire Belilos, a member of Vancouver’s Jewish community, disagrees. 'When you exhibit somewhere, you have to consider their values and policies, and if you don’t like those policies, you go elsewhere,' she said. “I think Kamins showed a total lack of sensitivity by exhibiting that piece, because Svend has proven by his actions and words that he’s an enemy of Israel. How would you like it if she painted a portrait of Hitler and showed it there, at the JCC, calling it free expression?' Rabbi Barry Leff, who leads the Beth Tikvah Congregation & Center in Richmond, British Columbia, agreed with Belilo ... Gerry Zipursky, the JCC’s executive director, told Vancouver’s weekly Jewish newspaper that he would discuss the issue at a future board meeting. He said Kamins agreed to remove the painting from the exhibit after she was informed that there had been some complaints, particularly from Holocaust survivors. He added, however that the removal of the piece was not about freedom of expression. 'We are clear about our loyalty and support and relationship with Israel,' he said. “That doesn’t mean to say that there can’t be freedom of expression, but if people try to make issues political in nature, in our view, we try to remain apolitical.” Kamins isn’t buying that explanation. 'I think the people who complained about that portrait want to stifle controversy,' she said. 'They’re pig-headed, narrow-minded bigots.'”

The family that bankrolled Europe,
BBC News, July 9, 1999
"The decision to auction 250 artworks owned by the famed Rothschild banking dynasty is a measure of how the once-great family has fallen. Rosie Millard reports on one of the auctions of the year. The collection of paintings, pieces of furniture and decorative objects were stolen by the Nazis in 1938 and only returned to the family in February this year. They were put up for sale because family members no longer have homes opulent enough in which to display them. The treasures, which together made up one of Europe's foremost private art collections, went under the hammer for £57m at Christie's auction house in London on Thursday. The collection, which included a beautifully illustrated 16th Century prayer book that sold for almost £8.6m, was formed by Baron Nathaniel Rothschild, who died in 1905. Ownership passed to his brother, Baron Albert, but, in 1938, the collection as seized by the German Reich within hours of Hitler annexing Austria. The brothers were descendants of Mayer Amschel Rothschild, who rose from a Frankfurt ghetto to establish the now legendary banking house ... Nathan Rothschild, one of Mayer's five sons, established the British arm, which went on to become massively influential in the UK economy. The dynasty has been credited with 'bailing out' the British government on more than one occasion. Like his other brothers, who set up branches in Paris, Vienna and Naples, Nathan profited from the Napoleonic wars, which finished in 1815. He is said to have ridden alongside the Duke of Wellington at the Battle of Waterloo. On realising a British victory, he dashed back to London and brought government stocks before anyone else knew of Napoleon's defeat. By the time the business had passed to the next generation, the Rothschilds were influencing the national economy and politics of several European countries. In 1875, Lionel Rothschild - the first Jew to enter British parliament - was, with a few hours notice, able to lend the £4m that allowed the British government to take control of the Suez Canal. Benjamin Disraeli, prime minister at the time, is said to have commented: 'You can't have too many Rothschilds.' But the family's powerful reputation made them a prime target for the Nazis, who seized the Rothschilds' property shortly before the war. Most of the art collection on sale at Christie's was hidden by Hitler's forces in salt mines."

Chagall & Chanel Brodovitch's genius,
by Robert Fulford, National Post (Canada), January 11, 2003
"Modern art made its way into the visual culture of North America by what once seemed an unlikely route, the pages of elite fashion magazines. Beginning in the 1930s, a few eager cultural entrepreneurs, Alexey Brodovitch being the most talented and persuasive, smuggled avant-garde painting, design and photography into the New World as backdrops for elegant couture. More than any other individual, Brodovitch (1898-1971) presided at the marriage of high art and chic, a marriage that remains intact today. Kerry William Purcell's elegant new book, Alexey Brodovitch (Phaidon, 272 pages, $99.95), describes an elaborate process of infiltration and assimilation, by which Brodovitch and Harper's Bazaar magazine taught New York, and then America, how to stop worrying and love modernity. ... Within a couple of years, Brodovitch had opened a new era, the first great age of the art director. He stayed with Snow for nearly a quarter of a century, 1934 to 1958, and eventually influenced at least half the graphic designers and three-quarters of the photographers in the world. As Truman Capote wrote in 1959: 'What Dom Perignon was to champagne, Mendel to genetics, so this over-keyed and quietly chaotic Russian-born American has been to the art of photographic design and editorial layout....' Brodovitch found fresh ways to give consumer fantasies an elevated, cultured background, showing a generation of designers how to set ridiculously priced dresses in an environment of good design and high art. It was value-added symbolism: Art heightened the worth of relatively mundane physical objects. He also found a way to make startling ideas acceptable by placing wild Surrealist images in pages that were laid out with architectural solidity ... Another photographer who worked for him, Louise Dahl-Wolfe, developed an on-location fashion style, taking clothes to distant corners of the world for exotic backgrounds, an approach that's been enriching the world's airlines ever since. Brodovitch figured out how to orchestrate the separate fields of photography, fashion, typography and illustration. He may have been the first designer who saw the two-page spread as a single unit; certainly, he exploited that idea more effectively than anyone else. He learned from the Surrealists how to use the power of juxtaposition, unlikely combinations of images side by side. He encouraged highly imaginative photography and refused to settle for less. He became a great teacher of photographers, such as Art Kane, Irving Penn and, above all, Richard Avedon. [All Jewish] No one ever called him amiable, and few found him charming. ... He was often away from his post, executing freelance commissions for Saks Fifth Avenue, Elizabeth Arden, Helena Rubinstein [All Jewish] and other clients of his own. He also contributed to the pretentious and much-parodied Great Ideas of Western Man series of advertisements, through which the Container Corporation sought to shine its image by publishing quotes from Plato, Rousseau and Jefferson, and illustrating them with elegant abstractions derived from modern art. There was something else that limited his power: the four-martini lunches that eventually became habitual and must have led to some drowsy, boss-annoying afternoons. In 1958, management finally replaced him with Henry Wolf, who went on to be one of the stars of the next historic generation, at Esquire and elsewhere."

Artistic Advisory Committee,
National Foundation for Jewish Culture
"Theodore Bikel, Chair. Samuel Adler, Eleanor Antin, George Bartenieff, Maurice Berger, Alan Bergman, Nancy Berman, Martin Bookspan, Joann Green Breuer Melvin Jules Bukiet, Gil Cates, Robin Cembalist, Elaine Charnov, John Corigliano, Art D’lugoff, Gordon Davidson, Beth Dembitze,r Morris Dickstein, Eliot Feld, Tom Freudenheim, Rebecca Goldstein, Allegra Goodman, Sheldon Harnick, Lisa Heller, Arthur Hiller, Omus Hirshbein, Agnieszka Holland ,Karen Brooks, Hopkins Annette Insdorf, Tobi Kahn, Josef Kalichstein, Veda Kaplinsky, Larry Kardish, Bel Kaufman, Irvin Kershner, Francine Klagsbrun, Stuart Klawans, Norman Kleeblatt, Milton Krents, Ezra Laderman, Pearl Lang, Liz Lerman, Nathan Leventhal, Harold Leventhal, Karen Malpede, David Mamet, Norman Manea, Sophie Maslow, Lynne Meadow, Chana Mlotek, Meredith Monk, Leonard Nimoy, Cynthia Ozick, Richard Pena, Jed Perl, Michael Posnick, Chaim Potok, Archie Rand, Nessa Rapoport, Steven Rathe, Joan Rosenbaum, Eddie Rosenstein, Ellen Schiff, George Segal, Isaiah Sheffer, Ilan Stavans, Elizabeth Swados, Martin Verdrager, Ruth Weisberg, Barry Weissler, Fran Weissler, Elie Wiesel, Joseph Wiseman ACADEMIC ADVISORY COMMITTEE: Paula Hyman, Chair. David Berger, Leon Botstein, Robert Chazan, Deborah Dash Moore, Hasia Diner, Arnold Eisen Todd Endelman, Michael Fishbane, David Fishman, Sylvia Barack Fishman, Rela Geffen, Michael Grunberger, Samuel Heilman, Stanley Katz, Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Sid Z. Leiman, Baruch Levine, Egon Mayer, Alan Mintz ,Jehudah Reinharz, David Ruderman, Jonathan Sarna, Robert Seltzer, David Sidorsky, David Sorkin, David Sperling, Michael Stanislawski, Ellen Umansky, Chaim Waxman, David Weiss Halivni,Yael Zerubavel FILM FUND PANELISTS Alan Berliner, Rachel Chanoff, David Dortort, Howard Dratch, Lyn Goldfarb, Elaine Holliman, Annette Insdorf, Larry Kardish,, Aviva Kempner, Ellen M. Krass, Greg Laemmle,William Nichols, Janis Plotkin, Daniel Polin, Michael Renov, Sharon Pucker, Rivo Ellen Schneider, Arnold Schwartzman, Andrea Simon, Janet Sternberg, Kenneth Turan, Suzanne Weil, Claudia Weill, Marc Weiss, Ira Wohl

[Variants of the Jewish art hustler, exhibit #9,454 -- the architect.]
The Libeskinds’: His Bronx Story Fused With Hers,
New York Observer, March 6, 2003
"Call them Mr. and Mrs. Ground Zero: Daniel and Nina Libeskind, with their short gray hair, black ensembles, leather jackets and artsy glasses, are steeling themselves for what is perhaps New York's hottest political crucible of the moment - the rebuilding effort at the World Trade Center ... But in the decade or so since Daniel, the distinguished professor, and Nina, who shares a starring role in Studio Daniel Libeskind as the driving force of its business side, have been designing actual buildings rather than promoting architectural education, they have become a political force to be reckoned with. The couple has, since taking on commissions as politically volatile and public as the Jewish Museum in Berlin and the controversial addition to Britain's Victoria & Albert Museum, come to know their way around a tricky commission-and both are essential to the operation ... Friends and acquaintances credit Ms. Libeskind with translating her husband's talent into competitive bids for commissions all over the world, and with managing massive staffs and budgets ... As the company grows and takes on more and more commissions around the world, Ground Zero will become its most closely scrutinized and uniquely challenging endeavor ... When Daniel and Nina took the stage in the small German city of Osnabrück to accept the commission for a museum dedicated to the work of Felix Nussbaum, a painter who perished during the Holocaust after hiding out in a basement studio, the mayor turned to Mr. Libeskind and said softly, 'This will never get built.' 'You want to bet?' came Ms. Libeskind's swift retort. The museum opened in 1999 ... With their possessions on board a freighter to California, where Mr. Libeskind had accepted a position as a senior scholar at the Getty Center in Los Angeles, the two went to Berlin to attend the announcement of the Jewish Museum design-competition winner ... The couple met at a summer camp for the children of Holocaust survivors near Woodstock, N.Y. ... Their backgrounds were surely different. Nina was the daughter of David Lewis, a Russian-born immigrant to Canada who founded the New Democratic Party, a party with labor support and a social democratic formula ... After years of effort, [Lebeskind's] parents were able to break past the Iron Curtain and, in 1957, made their way to Tel Aviv. The family lived in Israel for two years before booking passage to New York on the U.S.S. Constitution ... After early criticism, Larry Silverstein, who owns the lease on the [Ground Zero] site, has signed on to Mr. Libeskind's plan and vowed to finance the tall tower that is its defining element."

Becoming Richard Diebenkorn, Almost,
by John Seed, Art Site Guide
"By the time I had my graduate degree in Painting, it was 1982, the art world was coming to a boil, and new artists were making headlines. Clemente, Schnabel, Basquiat--young, splashy, challenging talents--made the work of artists like Diebenkorn seem suddenly ancient. I continued to admire his work, but after meeting the man, it was a little like a spell was broken, and I went through phases of admiring, copying and stealing ideas from at least a dozen other artists, living and dead. When I worked for the notorious art dealer Larry Gagosian in 1983, I was only half an hour from the Diebenkorn's house, but it seemed worlds away. One day Larry, and his buddy, film producer Keith Barish spilled out of Larry's office laughing hysterically, like ten year olds on a laughing jag. 'John', Larry said to me, 'Keith and I have a riddle for you: what kind of collectors buy Diebenkorns?' I shrugged. Larry gave the punchline: 'Rich Jews.' The pair laughed all the way out to Barish's Blue Bentley. How could Barish, a Jew himself, and the Producer of 'Sophie's Choice' possibly find the joke funny. To this day I still don't understand. I don't know if Barish was laughing because he was trying to buy one, or because he was making sure NOT to buy one. Cynicism can be confusing. It’s true that by the end of the 80's, owning an 'Ocean Park' painting was a label of liberal success. I saw one at the home of Norman Lear, the producer of 'All in the Family.' I recently saw a photo of Jane Ganz Cooney, the visionary behind 'Sesame Street' in front of her Diebenkorn. If those are the 'Rich Jews' that Gagosian was referring to, he chose the wrong people to slam. I suppose it dates me to confess to the world 'I once wanted to be Dick Diebenkorn.'"

Image Title: PIX SAATCHI GALLERY OPENING 15/4/2003. Description: Nude models outside the saatchi Gallery at a party to celebrate the opening of the new Saatchi Gallery, South Bank, London SE1 on 15th April 2003,
Don Features
[Photograph of dozens of nude people apparently bowing as human squid in homage to Jewish advertising mogul Charles Saatchi's new London art gallery.]

A familiar sensation?,
The Scotsman, April 7, 2003
"The year is 1990. The occasion is the opening of an art show called Gambler, a self-curated exhibition by some of London’s hip new artists. The highlight is a work called A Thousand Years by Damien Hirst. It consists of a decaying cow’s head in a perspex tank, slowly being consumed by maggots and flies. A green Rolls Royce pulls up outside the gallery. A man enters. Charles Saatchi stops open-mouthed in front of the cow’s head. He stares at it for a few minutes. Then he buys it. Now A Thousand Years has pride of place in the Hirst retrospective which opens Saatchi’s new gallery in the former County Hall on London’s South Bank. Along side it are the other icons of Brit Art: Tracey Emin’s My Bed, Marcus Harvey’s portrait of Myra Hindley, Marc Quinn’s cast of his own head in nine frozen pints of his own blood and Hirst’s sheep in formaldehyde. The Saatchi Gallery, as it is known, will open to the public on 17 April. Of course, the fur has already started to fly. It is good. It is bad. It is, according to one critic, 'risible'. It shows up the weakness of the work. It gives the work unexpected new dignity. It’s rivalling Tate Modern. It’s so 1990s, it’s just not where it’s at any more. This last snipe, levelled by ICA director Philip Dodd, comes closest to the bone. Saatchi’s name is synonymous with the artists who became known as the Brit pack, who rose to fame in the early 1990s. This was the era when British contemporary art became world famous, when the Turner Prize was cooler than the Brits. Fashions change however ... Within the world that was Brit Art, it is all too easy to cast Saatchi as the shadowy figure pulling the strings, all the more because he remains in the background, shunning all publicity. However, Brit Art was self-starting. Damien Hirst curated the first show, Freeze, in a Docklands warehouse in 1988 when he was still a student. He and his fellows were a remarkable group; young, hip and media-friendly. They probably would have succeeded on their own because their work was fresh, confrontational and shocking. What is unusual is that they did not simply succeed, they became superstars. That is where Saatchi comes in. He had collected art since the 1970s, from Carl Andre to Robert Rauschenberg. Few people paid much heed: plenty of rich people buy art. But when the so-called Young British Artists arrived on the scene, he moved his buying into the fast lane. Suddenly rather than buying occasional works he was buying entire libraries, trawling the studios of the East End for the next big thing. He was commissioning as well: Damien Hirst’s shark was a personal commission. Saatchi made his fortune in advertising. In the business, he had a knack for producing adverts with enough controversy attached - the pregnant man and the 'Labour isn’t working' series - to generate extra publicity through media commentary. He knew how to make the media work for the artists he patronised. ... 'He has had a huge influence on the culture of collecting. It was always there in the US and Germany, but not in Britain. After Saatchi a lot of people have started collecting - more quietly, but just as furiously. That is well established now and it’s not going away. "But the part played by Goldsmiths [College] was also very important. It was pushing out students, telling them they had to go out and sell themselves. Damien Hirst was his own great self-publicist. Saatchi was one more element in that whole brash, let’s-go-for-it environment.'"

$60 million of momentum.With the planning just starting, LACMA leaders view Eli Broad's pledge as a shot in the arm,
by Christopher Reynolds, Calendar Live (Los AngelesTimes), June 14, 2003
"It's only a five-page memorandum of understanding, signed by Eli Broad, donor, and Andrea Rich, president and director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. And those signatures have been drying only since June 6, Broad's 70th birthday. But the Broad gift plans that surfaced this week amount to a pledge of $60 million or more. Although its key goal is the creation of a new contemporary art building, LACMA's leaders are already imagining how this will change the shape of their institution. Broad, a LACMA trustee since 1995, aims to bankroll -- at a cost of $50 million or more -- a new building for the museum's collection of post-1945 art. Broad also plans to pump more than $10 million into a new fund for buying contemporary art and send at least 200 late-20th century works to LACMA from his personal or foundation collections on long-term loan."

[What is "art" in modern America? It is FEELING SORRY FOR THE JEWISH LOBBY:]
Shipwrecked Swimming with sharks in a sea of arts funding,
by Steven Leigh Morris, LA Weekly, JUNE 27 - JULY 3, 2003
"Dark clouds loomed over the Arts Alive rally, staged on behalf of the California Arts Council (CAC) last Wednesday afternoon at Santa Monica's 18th Street Arts Complex. As part of an attempt to redress a state deficit estimated at $38 billion, Governor Gray Davis has proposed dismembering the arts council with a 73 percent funding cut. Davis' proposal is the latest in a series of surgical strikes on the CAC budget, which, at $19 million earlier this year, would be slashed to $5 million under the new proposal, according to CAC's Adam Gottlieb. As an illustration of the climate change in arts funding, the entire proposed $5 million arts council budget equals the amount given to a single grant recipient in 1995: the Simon Wiesenthal Center's Museum of Tolerance. Furthermore, in what's become a growing scandal, funds allocated for the museum's "Tools for Tolerance" program (which trains educators and police on "diversity issues") are a budget "line item," meaning that it's pre-allocated every year by the governor (with legislative approval) - bypassing the peer-review process of other grants. And though the museum's CAC grant has dwindled over the years, its portion of the state arts budget stands to be 30 percent ($1.5 million) of the entire CAC allocation currently proposed by Davis. Besides the issue of fairness, this proposal begs the question of what a program educating kids and cops about diversity, however meritorious, is doing in an arts budget. (The governor has gone on record defending the museum's line item as an imperative after 9/11.) The museum's good fortune is as much a testament to the lobbying power of the Wiesenthal Center's dean, Rabbi Marvin Hier, as to the much larger social agenda of privatizing public services. For more than a decade and a half, Hier has had powerful backers among both Democratic and Republican lawmakers, from former Governor Pete Wilson and former Democratic leader Willie Brown, to President Bush and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who invited Hier to briefings on the war in Iraq. That one private museum should continue to receive such disproportionate public funding is particularly troubling in an era when federal tax cuts are driving many states toward bankruptcy and the public services they provide into oblivion. Meanwhile, according to 2001's Federal 990 Forms, filed on the center and its related activities, Hier draws an annual salary of more than $400,000 (not including pension benefits) - up from $225,000 in 1994. His wife, Marlene, serving as membership director, receives $244,000, while a son, Alan Heir, is paid $107,365 for fund-raising activities and another son, Rabbi Aron Hier, associate director, makes $76,018. Obviously, a private institution can pay its staff what it pleases, but since the center can afford such extravagant revenues for its administrators, detractors question the need of the museum to singularly gobble up 30 percent of the state's already gutted arts budget when, last week across town, money problems compelled the county Natural History Museum to fire 23 full-time and part-time specialists and employees."

Giving back through art. A conversation with Lois and Richard Rosenthal,
By Jerry Stein, Cincinnati Post, June 5, 2003
"What a great way to say thanks to their hometown. The Lois and Richard Rosenthal Foundation, which gave the leadership gift of $5 million for the new Center for Contemporary Arts, is the Cincinnati-born couple's most generous project ... Dick Rosenthal, a former chairman of the board of trustees, chairman of the committee to select the architect for the CAC and now a continuing board member, added, "My family is fourth generation Cincinnati and Lois' is third generation. The town has been good to all of the generations." Rosenthal's grandfather founded Cincinnati-based F &W Publications in 1913. Rosenthal, whose mother was the first licensed music therapist in Ohio, became general manager of F&W in 1971. Rosenthal led the publishing house through considerable growth. The Rosenthals sold the business in December 1999 to concentrate on their charitable foundation. "You've heard this a thousand times," Rosenthal said. "It's kind of a payback. We want to do something that says 'thank you, Cincinnati' for making this a great place to have been born and to raise our family." The Rosenthal Foundation has long been in the business of supporting arts in the city. Just this month, a $2.15 million grant to the Cincinnati Art Museum will make the Eden Park art treasury free to all ... As long as 15 years ago, the Rosenthals established the New Play Prize at the Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park. The prize, which offers a full production of a new play each year, has become one of the most important theater honors in the U.S. Lois Rosenthal cites this year's highly successful New Play Prize winner, Carson Kreitzer's "The Love Song of J. Robert Oppenheimer," as epitomizing Rosenthal support of new art ... Also at the Playhouse is the Rosenthal Next Generation Series, a lineup of diverse plays for children -- from storytelling to puppeteers -- held on Saturdays, fall through spring ... Lois Rosenthal said she is also starting to get involved with a Cincinnati chapter of the Innocence Project. "That was something that was started by Barry Scheck." Scheck is the New York attorney who was part of the O.J. Simpson defense team. He has long championed the employment of science as a means to clear the innocent wrongly accused of crimes ... Although he has served in various leadership roles at the CAC, Rosenthal said he is not an expert in contemporary art. And Lois Rosenthal, who is a trustee of the Cincinnati Art Museum, has never been on the CAC board ... The Rosenthals' commitment goes far beyond a checkbook. "We like to get as involved as much as we possibly can in the organizations to which we give the funding," Rosenthal said."

[Both Armand Hammer and Billy Wilder were Jewish]
'A nice building for Billy'. Audrey L. Wilder gives $5 million to the UCLA Hammer Museum to complete its theater, which will be named for her late husband,
By Suzanne Muchnic, Los Angeles Times (Calendar), July 25, 2003
"The UCLA Hammer Museum in Westwood has received a gift of $5 million from Audrey L. Wilder in memory of her late husband, film director and writer Billy Wilder. The donation is designated for the completion of the museum's theater, which was roughed out when the building opened in 1990 but was never finished. To be called the Billy Wilder Theater, the 288-seat facility will be jointly programmed by the art museum and the UCLA Film and Television Archive. The theater, says Audrey Wilder, is "the right place, the proper place" for a permanent tribute to her husband because of his longtime love of film and art. Billy Wilder, who died last year at 95, is best known as an Academy Award-winning director whose credits include such classics as "Sunset Boulevard," "Double Indemnity" and "Some Like It Hot." But he also was an inveterate collector of modern and contemporary art who cashed in at a 1989 auction, to the tune of $32.6 million, then continued collecting. Still surrounded by some of his artistic treasures, Audrey Wilder now is looking forward to what she calls "a nice building for Billy" — with his name, not hers, on it ... The museum was founded by Armand Hammer, chairman of Occidental Petroleum Corp., and financed by Occidental. It was designed by architect Edward Larrabee Barnes and built adjacent to Occidental's international headquarters at the corner of Wilshire and Westwood boulevards. Originally called the Armand Hammer Museum of Art and Cultural Center, it opened as the home of Hammer's art collection in November 1990, just a few weeks before his death. UCLA took over management and programming of the facility in 1994. The renovation was designed by Los Angeles architect Michael Maltzan in collaboration with graphic designer Bruce Mau of Toronto and landscape and interior designer Petra Blaisse of Amsterdam. In addition to the theater, the project calls for 3,650 square feet of new exhibition space, a hall for receptions and lectures and a classroom."

Legendary Critic Schonberg Dies,
New York Times, July 27, 2003
"Harold C. Schonberg, the ubiquitous and authoritative chief music critic of The New York Times from 1960 to 1980, whose reviews and essays influenced and chronicled vast changes in the world of opera and classical music, died yesterday... He was 87 and lived in Manhattan. Writing daily reviews and more contemplative Sunday pieces, Mr. Schonberg set the standard for critical evaluation and journalistic thoroughness. He wrote his reviews in a crisp, often staccato style that gave his evaluations unequivocal clarity and directness, attributes that earned him a Pulitzer Prize for criticism in 1971, the first for a music critic."

The Whitney's New Director,
New York Times, August 8, 2003
"Adam Weinberg is the new director of the Whitney Museum. Weinberg, who has been director of the Addison Gallery of American Art at Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass., since 1999, is no stranger to the Whitney. He has worked there twice before, most recently as a senior curator. He succeeds Maxwell L. Anderson, who resigned under fire in May."

[So a "godfather of the autobiographical comic" -- who decides to immortalize himself in a movie -- can't draw? Neat trick. Even someone top-heavy with Jewish neurosis has enough chutzpah to fall down to the top.]
Comic Book Icon Battles Everyday Life,
by Naomi Pfefferman, Virtual Jerusalem (from the JEWISH JOURNAL)
"In the biopic "American Splendor," cranky comic book icon Harvey Pekar frets in the supermarket. "This may be the shortest line, but I’m taking a risk because it’s an old Jewish lady," he says. When the woman argues with the manager, he storms out of the store. The banal but frustrating scenario is typical of Pekar’s autobiographical comics, the source for the well-received film. The movie chronicles his miserable life as a working-class intellectual in Cleveland, his dead-end job as a file clerk, his prickly third marriage, his weird friends, his cancer scare, his unplanned parenthood and his struggle to turn his life into a comic, although he can’t draw. An edgy hybrid of cartoon, drama and documentary, the film — by Robert Pulcini and Shari Springer Berman — won this year’s top prize at Sundance. While previous comic book superheroes counterbalance their Jewish creators’ fear of anti-Semitism, Pekar empowers people in a different way. "By recording the average person’s mundane struggles, he elevates the ‘little guy,’" Pulcini, 38, said. Pekar’s wry observations about these unsung heroes make him "the ultimate mensch of the comic world," Tikkun magazine wrote in 1992. In the tradition of Yiddishist-socialist authors of the early 20th century, he is "the self-educated, militantly egalitarian Jew in a world of pedigreed deceivers." Not that Pekar, 63, has escaped his own case of Jewish paranoia. "His pessimism feels like Jewish immigrant angst," said Paul Giamatti, who plays the artist in the film. "That was crucial for me in approaching the role: his family’s Holocaust legacy and the financial instability of his childhood home." At the Four Seasons Hotel recently, Pekar — looking incongruously cheerful in a Hawaiian shirt — described growing up with Polish parents who lost relatives in the Shoah. His mother, the daughter of a schochet (kosher slaughterer), was a communist who read the Daily Worker and refused to attend synagogue. His father, an Orthodox talmudic scholar, agonized over having to work Saturdays to eke out a living in the family grocery store. "Every night he would play cantorial records, the last thing before he went to bed," Pekar said, quietly. "A lot of it was so mournful ... I wouldn’t be able to sleep' ... While Pekar now considers himself a champion of Jewish music, he preferred jazz albums in his youth. It was while scouring a 1962 garage sale for LPs that he met underground comic book artist Robert Crumb: "His work got me thinking that comics didn’t have to be just about superheros, but about wage slaves like me," Pekar said. When Pekar showed him the storylines he had created, Crumb agreed to illustrate them. The result, in 1976, was "American Splendor," which made Pekar a godfather of autobiographical comics ... [F]inancial concerns were a reason Pekar sought to turn "Splendor" into a film starting in 1980. Two decades later, he finally enlisted producer Ted Hope and filmmakers Pulcini and Berman, known for lively documentaries such as "Off the Menu: The Last Days of Chasen’s."

It may be art, but can we live with it? Denver museum's provocative addition follows trend of turning showcases into statements,
Denver Post, August 20, 2003
"Boosters of the Denver Art Museum's avant-garde expansion wing hope the glass shards and titanium design will be the Eiffel Tower of the Rockies, becoming the instant postcard icon of the city and signaling urban sophisticates that Denver belongs on their itinerary next to Bilbao, New York or London. But what if the wing is just plain ugly? A number of average citizens and schooled architects wonder if the jarring style represented by Daniel Libeskind's design is more imposition than institution, more trend than truth, more spectacle than service to the community. The ever-growing list of comments jotted down in books next to the architectural model on display at the museum reflect the art world's ongoing debate: "Another private language, intelligible to some, incoherent to the rest of us." Or, more chillingly, this one: "I think it one of the ugliest designs I have ever seen. ... I'll not donate." None of the design's fans or stewards flinch at the direct attacks. They believe everyone will want to come see it, and while they would like the chance to walk everyone through the design and educate them about modern architecture, in a sense they don't much care if a good number of people hate it. They welcome the buzz and flash of either effusive praise or scathing critique ... The $90 million project is now under excavation, using $62.5 million in bonds approved by Denver voters in 1999, and $28 million from an ongoing fund drive. Erecting the steel alone for Libeskind's wildly overhanging structures will take all of 2004, with completion scheduled for late in 2006."

Art museum names new director as Vatican exhibit opening nears,
By DANIEL de VISE AND ELISA TURNER, Miami Herald, August 22, 2003
"Leaders of the Fort Lauderdale art museum, in a flurry of activity intended to raise its currency, named a new executive director Thursday and unveiled their most ambitious exhibition to date. The new chief of the Museum of Art, Fort Lauderdale, is Irvin Lippman, 55, a man credited with doubling the annual budget and raising attendance at the Columbus, Ohio, art museum over the past eight years."

Artist's protest mural is removed,
by Tim Gray, Staten Island Advance (New York), August 26, 2003
"It seems Mayor Michael Bloomberg is such a controversial figure, his image can inflame passions -- and now so has the disappearance of his image. When a controversial mural draped on a building adjacent to Engine Co. 212 in Williamsburg, Brooklyn -- one of six fire companies closed by the Bloomberg administration to save money -- was torn down under the cover of darkness early yesterday morning, it created a firestorm -- as well as another dose of ill will toward the city's administration. Scott LoBaido of St. George, the activist/artist who created the mural -- a 26- by 17-foot banner that depicts the mayor, wearing a Grinch-like grin, shooting a New Yorker wearing an "I love New York" T-shirt -- blamed the mayor yesterday for ordering the artwork removed and blasted him for "tightening the noose on free speech" and making his final march toward "destroying the city." "The man made millions and billions of dollars as a media mogul expressing his First Amendment rights, but when it comes to mine, I'm not good enough," said LoBaido, who claims one of the building's owners gave him permission to hang the protest banner. This is not the first time LoBaido has tangled with the mayor, who he blames for ruining the city with his policies, such as the smoking ban and the closing of firehouses, at the expense of the working class. Earlier this year, LoBaido stood outside City Hall clad in a Superman costume while Bloomberg signed the city's smoking ban into law. He said he chose the Man of Steel outfit because Superman "fights evil." But the mayor's office said Bloomberg -- who is in Israel on a humanitarian visit -- didn't order the unflattering likeness removed. Instead, they said, it was the owner who asked it to be yanked. An amateur video shot yesterday showed two unidentified Hasidic men loading the banner into a car, flanked by two New York City cops. But no one has claimed responsibility for the banner's removal. A man identifying himself as the son of the building owner said he had no idea who ordered it removed."

[What is "quality?" In poetry, in art, or anything else? Quality is what those who control culture deem it to be. Going back to 1988, at least six of the last ten American "poet laureates" have been Jewish: Louise Gluck, Stanley Kunitz, Robert Pinsky, Howard Nemerov, Mark Strand, and Joseph Brodsky. More info here.]
Time on Her Side,
by Joshua Clover, Village Voice, September 8, 2003
"The New Yorker commissioned a profile on Billy Collins when he was appointed poet laureate. It was his time, a poet of populist panache—the first to serve under the Bush presidency, and the best seller to hold the post since its inception. Facts were researched, sources reviewed, interviews conducted. The thing of it was, this all happened in the late days of summer 2001 ... It would be invidious to suggest that Louise Glück, who last week replaced Collins in the office down Library of Congress way, is the finer poet; better noted is how much more thoroughly she fits the moment ... . Recent write-ups paint her as a quasi-confessional purveyor of eros-gone-awry. She is the first woman to hold the position since the years before the gig's mid-'90s cultural ascent ... By the time of her Pulitzer Prize winner, 1992's The Wild Iris, the nouns have changed little; the scale, entirely ... Glück is not the only poet among the sanctioned elders and masters to bear chutzpah and scope; one might wonder that we have yet to see the laureateships of John Ashbery and Adrienne Rich, differently deserving and similarly monumental. One doesn't puzzle too hard, however. They might be too queer for government work, and moreover one or the other might decline the honor, embarrassing some pol. Glück has long held herself at least in part away from the fray; upon relenting to the request she edit Best American Poetry in 1993, she wrote, "I liked not participating in the tyranny of taste making' ... Even in the marginalized world of poetry, the dominant aesthetic still makes for a kind of tyranny, and Louise Glück will now perforce take a turn as the tyrant, albeit an enlightened and stylish one."

[The quintessential Jewish hustler at work. (Scroll down to second article on NYO page). Lesson: hustle, hustle, hustle, hustle. Chutzpah, chutzpah. Push, push, push. Camp out on the reviewer's doorstep? The obnoxious are rewarded.]
Michiko Masher Scores!,
by Ronda Kaysen, New York Observer, Septembr 10, 2003
"Rule No. 1 for writers: Don't try to hit on New York Times reviewers. Or maybe you should. Take a lesson from Leslie Epstein, author of nine books of fiction, including King of the Jews and Pandaemonium. "When I heard last night that Michiko Kakutani was going to review San Remo Drive, I didn't know what to think," said Mr. Epstein from his home in Boston. Given his last interaction with The Times' chief book critic, he had reason to sweat. Following the 1999 release of his last novel, Ice Fire Water, Mr. Epstein took out a series of classified ads decrying Ms. Kakutani's silence. "DEAR SWEET MISS MICHIKO K.-Call your Leib Goldkorn," begged one, which ran in one of those little spaces at the bottom of The Times' front page in October 1999. Leib Goldkorn, the recurring 94-year-old protagonist of several of Mr. Epstein's books, just so happened to have a crush on the reclusive book critic. "Why?" you might ask. Because, in the novel, she just adored the elderly Goldkorn's latest book-and even fictional authors can't resist the adoration of finicky critics. "I thought it was cute and was hoping she would find it cute, too," said Mr. Epstein of his ploy-or, should we say, Mr. Goldkorn's ploy-to woo Ms. Kakutani through the pages of her own paper. "But she didn't." Ms. Kakutani was not interested in Mr. Epstein's aged character at all. Instead, after half a dozen of the ads ran-costing Mr. Epstein a cool six grand, the better part of his $10,000 advance-she demanded that the paper's advertising department pull his upcoming November ad, which read, "YOO-HOO! MY CUTE KAKUTANI!-Leib Goldkorn is calling," along with the six remaining ads to follow. "I never heard from her and was going send her a note, but I thought it would come across as slavish," said Mr. Epstein, who bowed out without a fight when the advertising department let him know that the object of his affections likened him to a stalker. When San Remo Drive, a novel based on his own Hollywood childhood-he's the son of Casablanca co-writer Philip Epstein-was published in April of this year with no review from The Times, Mr. Epstein began to sweat. "I lost hope and thought they'd never review me. I thought I'd just foolishly burned my bridges," said Mr. Epstein. This time he waited sheepishly, understanding Ms. Kakutani's silence. "I think she felt her privacy was invaded and was plenty pissed." Then, on Monday night, he received an e-mail from his publicist: Ms. Kakutani was reviewing his latest. And, to his even greater surprise, he woke up yesterday morning to a glowing review. Ms. Kakutani called the novel "a keenly observed portrait of Los Angeles" and compared him to F. Scott Fitzgerald and Joan Didion."

[Where was self-destructive poet goddess Sylvia Plath staying when she committed suicide? Of course. With those who dominate modern literature: a contingent of Jewish "friends."]
A friend's memoir of days leading up to Plath's suicide,
 By Carlin Romano, Philadelphia Inquirer, Septemnber 11, 2003
" Forty years after Plath committed suicide by sticking her head in a gas oven after putting out milk and bread for her two children, every writerly type in the English-speaking world has a few bytes of their tale stored away. Plath, the outgoing, tremendously ambitious yet also clinically depressed 30-year-old Smith College graduate, reeling from [Ted] Hughes' leaving her for an affair with a married woman, cut short a poetic career of blossoming greatness. Hughes, the intensely private poet but sloppily public ladies' man and future poet laureate, shaped his ex-wife's canon for decades while avoiding public debate on his behavior until Birthday Letters (1998), his surprising near-death conversation with Plath in poems that speak to her and her work. Over the years, scores of scholars have explored the personal, ideological and literary issues provoked by the Plath-Hughes partnership ... [Jilian] Becker and husband Gerry - the couple with whom Plath came to live in London immediately before her suicide - were Plath's "closest acquaintances" in her final days. Over the years, Becker reports, she's cooperated with a couple of Plath's biographers, with unpleasant results. She resents the opinion, expressed in a few books, that the Beckers - from whose house Plath returned home to kill herself - "let her go too soon." ("Could I or Gerry," Becker asks, "or anyone at all have given her a reason for living if her children were not reason enough?") So she decided to set down her memories of Plath "while I still have them." A Jewish writer from South Africa who wrote poetry in the early '60s, then published several novels and works of nonfiction, Jillian Becker met Plath only after Hughes fled to pursue his affair with Assia Wevill, a beautiful married friend who several years later also killed herself, along with the daughter she'd borne out of wedlock with Hughes. At the time of their meeting, Becker recalls, Plath "was lonely, almost friendless as well as husbandless. The flattering courtiers had departed with the king." Becker quickly shows she's no exploitative tangent to the main event, cashing in on more talented betters. A pithy, precise writer with an eye for detail, she describes a Plath plainly less heroic than the poet's champions might prefer."

Anti-Israel exhibit opens with government support,
By JANICE ARNOLD, Canadian Jewish News, October 9, 2003
"The Quebec-Israel Committee (QIC) is angry over a government-funded exhibit called “Artists Against the Occupation,” an international project launched by a Japanese artist who believes Israel is to blame for the Mideast conflict. The exhibit opens Sept. 25 at the MAI (Montreal Arts Interculturels) cultural centre by the City of Montreal with $8,000 in funding from the Canada Council for the Arts. It runs until Nov. 1 as the launching event of the MAI’s 2003-2004 season. QIC interim executive director Sara Saber-Freedman said the QIC is concerned the government is supporting the exhibition and said it intends to “intervene” with those funding bodies. “In investing public dollars, I think the funders are obliged to look for some kind of balance. “We hope members of the community will write to the government agencies involved and make them aware of their outrage.” MAI was created with major support from the city in 1999. It is now described as an independent, non-profit institution, but its building on Jeanne Mance Street is owned by the city and the centre is funded by three levels of government. “Artists Against the Occupation” displays works that address the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in a variety of media by 33 artists, mostly from Quebec. The curators are Freda Guttman, an installation artist and member of the Jewish Alliance Against the Occupation and the International Solidarity Movement, and Beirut-born artist Rawi Hage. Saber-Freedman said the exhibit is “very clearly one-sided… We are obviously offended by the lack of balance. One would like to hope that there are artists also concerned with terrorism and the murder of innocent Jews.” “Artists Against the Occupation” was launched by Mizuko Yakuwa in 2001 in Tokyo with her solo exhibit “Palestine, Palestine.”

A legacy of poetic provocation,
By REGINA HACKETT, SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER, October 10, 2003
"Kurt Cobain thought Steven Jesse Bernstein's suicide was romantic. Sharing this view with Larry Reid brought the conversation to an unpleasant close. "I told him he was talking horseshit," said Reid, curator of "More Noise Please: A Portrait of Steven Jesse Bernstein," opening tonight at Experience Music Project. Master of ceremonies on Seattle's counterculture arts scene for decades, Reid could sell wool to sheep but cut no ice with Cobain, who followed Bernstein's example a few years later. Neither did Reid get far with Oliver Stone, who used a track from Bernstein's posthumously produced spoken word "Prison" album (Sub Pop) for the opening of "Natural Born Killers." "Oliver Stone told me he didn't believe that Jesse had killed himself," said Reid. "I said I was sure he had, but Stone kept talking about the research he'd done, that less than 1 percent of suicides slit their throats. It's just not a way people choose to go." Being in the minority was a way of life for Bernstein. Dead at 40, he would have made a great old man. Poet, performance artist, playwright, actor and friend of what he called the expendable people, he was already practicing to be an elder of the tribe when he took a pass on the rest of his life one morning in Neah Bay, Oct. 22, 1991, after calling his closest friends to say goodbye. That must have taken days. If nobody but Bernstein's closest friends show up at EMP, they'll fill the room. Known in London as the godfather of grunge, he didn't live to hear the term and undoubtedly would have disdained it. He not only liked the naked elegance of the music, he helped shape it, opening for the bands (Nirvana, Big Black, Soundgarden, U-Men, the Crows) who went on to the big time, and working the crowd into a ecstatic heat. He liked to cause a stir. When in the mood, he added to his legend. When not, he complained about it. "All the stories about me are true," he said. Here's a few that plausible witnesses have verified. He read poems from a stage with a live rodent in his mouth, its tail twitching as baseline punctuation. He tried to cut his heart out in order to hold it in his hands and calm it down. He once urinated on a heckler and tended to throw things: beer bottles, manuscripts, drumsticks, his wallet, a sandwich. He never romanticized the mental illness that plagued him. He was the first punk poetry slammer. He was irresistible to women ... Here's Bernstein on the great outdoors: "I put my mouth to the road and suck." On eating: "I sneak a cream of wheat sandwich and stale sweet roll, wash it down with juice squeezed from a leather belt." On drinking: "There are rooms full of spooks drunk on dish soap spiked with whatever was left on the tables when the bar closed." On evolution: "Life originally came from miles of dead parties, decomposing cardboard, sequins, noise makers and sadness." On midlife crisis: "Men who look confused, like fish getting clubbed on the pier." On autobiography: "The following is pure fiction. I've been handsome and popular all my life."

McGill's lost treasure Queen's gets art. Donor was victim of Jewish quota system that limited access to Montreal campus,
by ALAN HUSTAK; DAVID PINTO, Montreal Gazette, October 23, 2003
"Queen's University in Kingston, Ont., is getting a valuable painting by Rembrandt that might otherwise have come to Montreal if the donor, Alfred Bader, had not been refused admission to McGill University in 1941 because he is a Jew. The painting, estimated to be worth millions of dollars, is the latest bequest to Queen's from Milwaukee philanthropists Bader and his second wife, Isabel. "The Rembrandt is just one brick in the wall," Bader said. "I am leaving Queen's my whole collection. I have given them so far 120 paintings, many of which are very good indeed." Bader, 80, was born in Vienna and at age 14 was one of the Jewish kindertransport children shipped out of the country to escape the Nazis during the Second World War. He arrived in Montreal when he was 17, and for the next seven years considered the city his home. His latest gift to Queen's, he says, is another payment of the continuing debt of gratitude he owes the university. "McGill wouldn't accept me. I am a Jew," Bader said in a telephone interview ... Over the years, he made a fortune in chemicals and has assembled an outstanding collection of Dutch art. Bader has been a generous benefactor to his Canadian alma mater. Ten years ago, he bought a castle in Sussex, England, he donated to Queen's ... The painting was originally identified as the work of one of Rembrandt's students. But Bader, certain the work was painted by the master, bought it at auction for about $200,000 in 1979. His hunch was confirmed. No one will say how much the painting is worth, but a Rembrandt self-portrait, painted in 1634 and considered an inferior work, sold at auction this year for $15.6 million; other works recently sold for more than $30 million. Had things been different and he been able to get into McGill, Bader said, "my collection would have gone to McGill, certainly."

[Charles Saatchi is Jewish, as is Tate museum director Serota.]
Shock art turns on the Tate 'I'd rather go to Alton Towers than Tate Modern,' says rebel artist Chapman,
by David Smith, The Observer (UK), November 2, 2003
"They have turned shock and awe into an art form and set the agenda for the tumult over the Turner Prize. Now the Chapman brothers have broken another taboo by biting the hand that feeds them. Jake Chapman, half of the pair dubbed 'the Brothers Grim', has unleashed an excoriating attack on the Tate Modern and Saatchi galleries, accusing them of threatening the future of art by bowing to the lowest common denominator. He called the Tate a 'monument to absolute cultural saturation' and said he would rather take a ride at Alton Towers than look at some of its contents. Charles Saatchi's gallery was 'simply an expression of one man's ownership'. Chapman attacked his fellow 'Young British Artists', saying they were part of a growing cult of celebrity, and claimed some now use art as 'a symptom of their ego'. Although for centuries the world's greatest artists were forced to flatter their patrons to scrape a living, the Chapmans clearly feel no obligation to be polite about Saatchi, whose £500,000 purchase of their installation Hell rescued them from impoverished obscurity. The leading collector paid a further £1 million for their Chapman Family Collection of pseudo-ethnic wooden carvings and is now boosting their status among Brit Art's biggest stars with a major retrospective at his gallery on London's South Bank. Jake Chapman was even more scathing about Tate Modern, despite the brothers' attempt to win the Tate's flagship competition, the £20,000 Turner Prize, launched last week at its sister gallery, Tate Britain. Among the brothers' Turner exhibits a sculpture entitled Death, depicting two blow-up dolls in a graphic sex act, the subject of furious debate since it was revealed by The Observer last week. Sir Nicholas Serota, the Tate director and chairman of the Turner judges, seems unshockable when viewing art, but he may find it harder to dismiss Chapman's disdain for Tate Modern, housed in the former Bankside power station Chapman said: 'You can see things at both the Saatchi and Tate Modern which are bending, swerving towards a kind of lowest common denominator which could have a very negative effect on the production of art itself.'"

[Jews dominate the art world. Donald Gordon, below, is also Jewish.]
Tycoon celebrates dual citizenship with £20m arts donation,
by Maev Kennedy, Guardian (UK), November 17, 2003
"A shower of gold has fallen on the Royal Opera in Covent Garden and the Wales Millennium Centre. Over the next five years, they will get £10m each to create new productions, in one of the largest private gifts ever to the performing arts. Donald Gordon, a South African businessman living in London, who heads the shopping centres giant Liberty International, said the donations, and a string of other grants in South Africa, were to celebrate his becoming a dual citizen ... Mr Gordon himself cheerfully described the gift as a retirement hobby. He retires next year as head of Liberty, which owns some of the biggest shopping centres in the UK, including the Metro in Gateshead and the Lakeside in Thurrock . The arts donations, he said, "will launch me into a fascinating activity which could be an important focus of my life in retirement." He also admitted his aim is to cheat the tax man. "My objective is to use my investment base to its maximum economic potential during the course of the rest of my life rather than the much diminished amount which would be left after payment of estate duties and other taxes, following my demise."

[Too bizarre to be satire or caricature: A rich "split personality" Jew literally named "Lust" starts feeding Israel his art collection in the hope that it will generate more money for Israeli tourism. What, we wonder, would the dead artist Giacometti think about what his art has been prostituted to become: political whore feed. Jewish money dominance of the art world, here.]
Giacometti's `failure',
By Dalia Karpel, Haaretz (Israel), December 24, 2003
"The friendship between Herbert Lust and artist Alberto Giacometti began at a Paris luncheon in late 1949. Lust, now 77, a wealthy retired investment banker and respected art collector, was then a brilliant student at the Sorbonne and, as he describes it, "very weird, a split personality," with ambiguous sexual tendencies to boot. He'd gone to Paris on a prestigious Fulbright scholarship from the University of Chicago, where he was the youngest student ever to receive a master's degree in philosophy and mathematics, and had learned ancient Greek in order to master Aristotle and Sophocles. Lust's impressive art collection included some of the most important works of Giacometti, who died 37 years ago at the age of 65. This year, he and his wife donated these works to the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, where they are now on display. The exhibition, curated by Prof. Mordechai Omer, includes a small number of sculptures and about 100 works on paper, drawings and prints - most from the Lust collection and some on loan from private collectors and from the Israel Museum. Lust, an American Jew and native Chicagoan, is also an art scholar. In 1970, he edited a comprehensive catalogue of Alberto Giacometti prints. A catalogue was also published, in both Hebrew and English, for the Tel Aviv exhibit, in which Lust wrote two chapters about facts and events in the artist's life, from the vantage point of a friend and eyewitness. The Tel Aviv Museum has also published (in English only) an edition of "Alberto Giacometti - Friendship and Love," a very personal memoir that Lust wrote in 2000. In this book, he detailed his friendship with the artist and dozens of their conversations, along with shared experiences, including sexual ones, in Giacometti's studio. Lust arrived in Paris in 1949, armed with letters of recommendation to some of the key figures in the French capital, and an avant-garde novel he'd penned, entitled "Violence and Defiance" ("One of 10 that I wrote under the influence of the writings of Proust, Faulkner and Kafka. Nine were not published, because they were too avant-garde," Lust said this week). Lust wove his true life story into the novel, which revolves around a brutal killer. Thanks to his excellent connections, he was invited to a luncheon at the home of Joan Rayner, a charismatic member of the Bloomsbury literary group, who was impressed with the novel he had written. Rayner sat Lust next to Giacometti, who was immersed in an argument with one of the other guests about the dispute between Andre Breton and Jean-Paul Sartre ... Lust went on to tell Giacometti an elaborate - and fictitious - life story. How, as a young Romanian Jew, he and his family survived the war, how the communists murdered his father, and how he crossed the Carpathian mountains alone and barefoot, subsisting on insects for weeks. Giacometti was mesmerized and immediately invited the young man to drop by his studio ... Lust came to Israel for the first time in 1960, after having met with Menachem Begin - then the leader of a small opposition party - in New York and discovering that they shared an admiration for Nietzsche. He spent three months here, exploring investment options. He also accompanied Begin to the Knesset several times and was a guest in his apartment on Rosenbaum Street. Lust discussed French literature with Begin's wife Aliza. His last visit here was 12 years ago, and he says that his current visit is the most important of all. In addition to the Giacometti works, Lust also donated to the museum an important early work by Robert Indiana from 1961 and three works by Man Ray. "Israel today is being treated dreadfully by Europe and suffering from anti-Semitism, and since I love Israel, I asked myself what I could do for it. As an old man, I can't go to Ramallah and kill Arafat. The only thing I could do was to make the Tel Aviv Museum a central and important museum in the international art world." One might think that Lust is another one of those very right-wing American Jews, but he defines himself as "a liberal with a leftist tendency" ..."I'm different," he smiles. "I'm the only art collector who decided to donate to the Tel Aviv Museum and not to the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. What I do always comes out a little different and unusual ... Israel is presently fighting for its survival and I realize that no one understands how important art is in this." Lust has made a simple economic calculation: "In the United States, there are about a million art lovers, and in Europe and Japan there are about a million more, and these people don't come to Israel because there isn't enough good art by their standards. If Israel had one museum on an international level, like the ones you find in Paris, Rome or New York, and only 3 percent of the millions of art consumers in the world came here, that would mean 60,000 tourists who would spend, let's say, $1,000 apiece here, which comes to $60 million a year."

[The Jew and the Literary Establishment. Jim Irsay's rich Jewish father was Robert Irsay -- originally named Robert Israel. Author Ann Douglas notes that famous Beatnik author Jack Kerouac once became "ever more paranoid," thinking that "the New York Jewish critics were plotting against him; he joked bitterly about titling Big Sur (1962), 'Another idea for the Jews to Steal.'" [DOUGLAS, A., 19-99] In 2001, Jim Irsay bought Kerouac's original manuscript On the Road, at auction, for over two million dollars. (Jewish author Franz Kafka's The Trial had "held the previous record for an original manuscript sold at auction.") [HERMAN, J., 5-22-01]
Kerouac's 'On the Road' Begins Museum Tour,
Yahoo! News (from Associated Press), January 13, 2004
"Jim Irsay, owner of the Indianapolis Colts, talks about his purchase of the original manuscript of the first draft of Jack Kerouac's "On The Road," in Indianapolis ... Irsay bought Kerouac's epic for $2.43 million, a 50-year-old, 120-foot scroll of single-spaced typewritten account of his trip about wandering across America. Beginning this week at the Orange County History Center in Orlando, Fla., and ending with a three-month stay at the New York Public Library in 2007, Kerouac's "On the Road" scroll will make a 13-stop, four-year national tour of museums and libraries ... In a conversation after he brought the scroll with director Cameron Crowe and journalist Hunter S. Thompson, Irsay said they discussed the manuscript's continued relevance as a chronicle of American discovery. Kerouac wrote the novel in a coffee-saturated, 21-day typewriter marathon at a friend's apartment in New York City in 1951. When finally published six years later, it won critical acclaim as an unconventional masterpiece, defining a post-World War II generation of intellectual outlaws on an aimless, odyssey across the American landscap ... When Kerouac died, his estate was reportedly valued at less than $100 ... Irsay inherited the Colts in 1997 when his father passed away. At 44, he is the NFL's youngest team owner. The scroll, which was once thought to have been stored in a dorm room closet, exchanged hands often after Kerouac's death in 1969. It had been part of the Berg Collection at the New York Public Library until the 2001 auction, which was held to pay for debts in Kerouac's estate."

[JTR Contributor' comment: "The schism between Sweden and Israel, or should I say world Jewry, is taking bigger and bigger proportions. Thomas Nordanstad, the person who is artistically responsible for the exhibition where the now famous piece of art is a part, has received hundreds of death threats from Jews and Zionists. Yesterday he was even attacked outside the Historical museum by an unidentified man who tried to push him down the steep stairs leading up to the museum entrance. Dror Feiler, the Israeli Jew behind the “anti-Semitic” art, has also been a target for Jewish hatred. After several death threats, both by phone and by e-mail, he is now living under police protection round the clock. Jews are also running about handing out leaflets outside the museum. There have also been several attacks on the exhibit, keeping the six guards dedicated to protecting it very busy. Around the world some really good examples of chutzpah are taking place. The notorious Simon Wiesenthal Center, for instance, released this press information on Sunday: The Center “calls into question whether Sweden is right host for anti-genocide conference”. Well, I guess Israel is better suited according to the Wiesenthal weasels. They also claim that “Stockholm was entirely to blame for allowing a so-called ‘work of art’” and that “the only difference it will make is to encourage and glorify further suicide attacks against innocent civilians around the world”. In other words Stockholm and Sweden is guilty of encouraging suicide attacks, not only in Israel, but around the world. The Israeli policies are, of course, blameless: the triggering factor is Sweden. Rabbi Cooper adds “Instead of calling in the Israeli Ambassador Zvi Mazel to explain his actions on Monday, the Swedish government should explain to the world why they are an appropriate host for an international conference against genocide, when Sweden allows the glorification of terrorists who themselves are guilty of crimes against humanity”. Perhaps the Wiesenthal Center instead could explain why they are an appropriate organization to interfere in other countries' business. When a monument was erected in Israel to honor the Jewish mass murderer Baruch Goldstein, the Simon Wiesenthal Center did not utter a word, they did not argue that it could lead to even more Jewish violence against Gentiles, they did not even comment on how distasteful that action was. The Wiesenthal Center is fond of talking about tolerance, but what they actually demand is that everyone must tolerate everything beneficial to Jews, while being completely intolerant when it comes to anything on collision course with those interests."]

[JTR Contributor's Comment: "The Israeli ambassador to Sweden, Zvi Mazel, made havoc at the Swedish Museum of History yesterday, trashing a piece of art for its 'anti-Semitic undertones'. This is today¹s top story in Swedish media, but I guess it will not get much attention abroad. However, there is some information about it here: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/17/international/europe/17BRIE1.html The 'Palestinian' art mentioned is in fact very Jewish. The man behind it is the Jew Dror Feiler, an Israeli citizen, born in Tel Aviv 1951 and a former parachutist in the IDF. Today he is involved in the Peace movement, trying to make Jews and Palestinians to reconcile. Zvi Mazel, by the way, made headlines a couple of months ago when he blasted the Swedish archbishop KG Hammar, calling him an anti-Semite for supporting a boycott of Israeli goods. I noticed that you wrote about Oscar Berger becoming president in Guatemala. I have also noticed that the vice President is a certain Eduardo Stein, the former Minister of Foreign Affairs. Stein had his education in the USA and served later on as an advisor to the Panamanian government. Is either Berger or Stein Jewish? Well, I do not know, but I have forwarded the question to a Jewish journalist and will of course let you know what he replies."]
Israel's Sweden Envoy Attacks Suicide Bomber Art,
By Peter Starck and Jeffrey Heller, Reuters, January 17, 2004
"Israel defended its ambassador to Sweden on Saturday after he attacked and damaged a Stockholm art exhibit that made an avant-garde link between a Palestinian suicide bomber and Snow White. Sweden's Foreign Ministry said ambassador Zvi Mazel had behaved improperly and that it would summon him for talks on Monday. "He will have the opportunity to explain why he did what he did," Catherine von Heidenstam, chief of protocol at the Swedish foreign affairs ministry, told Reuters. "Snow White and the Madness of Truth" was created by expatriate Israeli artist Dror Feiler, an activist in Jews for Israeli-Palestinian Peace, a Stockholm-based group opposed to the Israeli occupation in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. The artwork consisted of a rectangular basin filled with red fluid. A boat floated on top carrying a portrait of Hanadi Jaradat, who killed herself and 22 Israelis in an attack on a restaurant in the northern Israeli city of Haifa in October. The Israeli Foreign Ministry said the piece glorified the bomber. Israel Radio quoted Feiler -- who has also composed works of music with titles such as "Shrapnel" and "You Are Dead" -- as accusing the ambassador of vandalism. Mazel said he saw red when he came upon the artwork on Friday while visiting an exhibition in Stockholm's Historical Museum tied to an international conference on genocide coming up in Sweden later this month. "RIVERS OF BLOOD" "My wife and I stood there and began to tremble," Mazel told Ynet, the Internet site of Israel's Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper. "There was the terrorist, wearing perfect makeup and sailing placidly along the rivers of blood of my brothers and the families that were murdered." He said he ripped out electrical wires attached to spotlights illuminating the exhibit and that one of fixtures fell into the basin. In a statement, the Israeli Foreign Ministry said the Swedish government had promised not to link the conference with the Middle East conflict. "The exhibit that glorified the actions of a suicide bomber who murdered 22 people is a violation of that understanding, and if it is not removed, Israel will reconsider its participation in the conference," the ministry said. Kristian Berg, the museum's director, said he realized the installation might have been emotional for Mazel, but that destroying art was unacceptable: "If you don't like what you see, you can leave the premises," he told SR."

Israeli ambassador to Sweden attacks and damages a Stockholm art exhibit,
[VIDEO. Click on: "Ambassadören attackerar och förklarar sig" in right hand corner.]

["Anti-semitism!" "Antisemitism!" Even from Israeli artists! Destroying art on the walls of an art gallery is a crime. Will the perpetrator walk because he did it in the name of, uh, innate Jewish righteousness, victimhood, Holocaust victims, and a blow against -- yes -- Jewish/Israeli anti-Semitism? If this controversial artist had been a non-Jew, he would have been denounced, his career ruined, and stoned in a public square at the first opportunity.]
Sharon praises 'art vandal' envoy Israeli-born artist Dror Feiler,
BBC News (UK), January 18, 2004
"Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has praised his ambassador to Sweden after he vandalised an art exhibit featuring a Palestinian suicide bomber. Ambassador Zvi Mazel was ejected from a Stockholm museum after the incident. Mr Mazel said the work, created by an Israeli-born artist, was "a call for genocide". Israel has called on the Swedish Government to dismantle the exhibit, which has a boat floating in a pool of red liquid. "I think the phenomenon [of anti-Semitism] is so serious that it would have been forbidden not to have acted on the spot," Mr Sharon said. But the expatriate Israeli artist, Dror Feiler, rejected the criticism of his work, saying it had a message of openness and conciliation. "I'm absolutely opposed to suicide bombers," he added. Mr Feiler called the envoy "an intellectual dwarf" who had tried to "stop free speech and free artistic expression". Sweden's foreign ministry has summoned Mr Mazel to give an explanation for his actions on Monday. Ambassador Mazel was expelled from Stockholm's Museum of Antiquities on Friday after he threw a spotlight at the exhibit. Called Snow White And The Madness Of Truth, the installation features a photo of Hanadi Jaradat, a 29-year-old trainee lawyer who blew up herself and 19 Israelis in a Haifa restaurant in October. The work is accompanied by a piece of Bach music entitled My Heart Is Swimming In Blood. The installation was commissioned ahead of a conference on genocide to be held later in January ... "I called our ambassador in Sweden Zvi Mazel last night and thanked him for his strength in dealing with increasing anti-Semitism, and told him that the entire government stands behind him," Mr Sharon told a cabinet meeting Sunday. "I think Ambassador Mazel behaved in an appropriate way." Israeli foreign ministry spokesman David Saranger had urged the Swedish Government to "take steps to remove it". The director of the museum, Kristian Berg, said the installation would remain in place. "You can have your own view of what this piece of art is all about, but it is never, never allowed to use violence and it is never allowed to try to silence the artist," he said."

Israel Versus Free Speech. In vandalizing a Stockholm art exhibit, Israel's ambassador to Sweden showed the true face of his government,
by Justin Raimondo, antiwar.com
"When Israel's ambassador to Sweden vandalized a work of art that he found offensive on exhibition at Sweden's Museum of National Antiquities, Zvi Mazel did the world a service: he opened our eyes to Israel's descent into barbarism. Just as Israeli tanks bulldoze entire blocks of Palestinian homes, so her ambassador seeks to bulldoze the rising tide of protest against Israeli government policies in the West. The artwork, by Israeli artist Dror Feiler and his Swedish wife, Gunilla, featured a pool of red water illuminated by spotlights in which a small boat floats, its sail a photo of suicide bomber Hanadi Jaradat. The incident was captured on video, and if you want to see the full ugliness of the face that Israel now chooses to present to the world, check it out: Real Player dialup, Real Player broadband, Windows Media dialup, Windows Media broadband. This video is fascinating in that it thoroughly debunks the impression given by Mazel and his supporters that this was an impetuous act, brought about by righteous rage over a hideous act of anti-Semitism. Instead of Mazel on an emotional rampage, it shows the cool calculated way in which the ambassador walked unhurriedly around the pool, calmly unplugging the spotlights and pushing one of them into the water, like an actor following a script. We are then treated to the confrontation between Mazel and the museum director, who asks, plaintively, "but didn't you read the statement?" He is referring to the artists' statement accompanying the installation, which does not in any way condone violence. Indeed, it expresses sympathy for the victims of Ms. Jaradat's act, even while seeking to explain it. But in addressing Mazel as if he were open to reason, the director was wasting his breath. If this wasn't a planned provocation, then it certainly succeeded in looking like one. It is clear even in the title of the Feilers's work, "Snow White and the Madness of Truth," that the artists, far from endorsing, advocating, or glorifying Jaradat's mad act, are quite clearly horrified by it. The smiling face of a beautiful woman floating on an ocean of blood is hardly an image likely to generate much sympathy for suicide bombers: to characterize this as propaganda on behalf of Islamic Jihad is visibly and jarringly wrong. But the artwork itself no longer matters, because the Israelis have now made this the latest chapter in their ongoing propaganda narrative about "anti-Semitic" and "hate-filled" Europe – where speech deemed anti-Semitic is outlawed and the faintest weakest echo of Hitlerian ideology is relentlessly silenced. But, again, none of this matters. As a propagandistic exercise, Mazel's provocation was designed to challenge the very idea that "the madness of truth" needs to be explained. Because to examine it too closely is to focus on Israel's role in perpetuating the cycle of violence – and that cannot be permitted ... All this is part and parcel of a general offensive on the part of Israel's amen corner worldwide, a series of provocative acts that dramatizes the unleashing of Israeli power in the wake of the American invasion of Iraq – and not only in the Middle East. Cynical manipulation and aggression on every front: these are the methods that characterize Israeli policy and the tactics of its partisans in every country. Free speech is everywhere the enemy of Israel's interests – and the Israelis know it." That's why their supporters, both here and abroad, are ratcheting up the campaign to smear critics of Israel and impose limits on their right of free expression: "Freedom of art is not limitless," brays Mazel. "There are always some limits." The only thing there seems to be no limit on is the brazen aggression of Israel and its apologists."

[The censorial Jewish Lobby at work in the art world. Question: what if this "anti-Semitic" artist below wasn't a former Israeli paratrooper, but was a Gentile? And what if this incident had happened in America where the government is in Israel's pocket, and the art world is dominated by Jews, many Israel worshippers? It's scarey to think.]
'It's inciting murder'. How did one piece of art pit Ariel Sharon against the Swedish government - and kick off an international crisis?,
by Jonathan Jones, Guardian (UK), Thursday January 22, 2004
"[T]his is the stupidest story you will ever hear about art, outrage and international diplomacy. Only it isn't funny. On Friday night there was an incident in Stockholm that rapidly involved Ariel Sharon and the Swedish government in an international crisis that shows no signs of being resolved. Zvi Mazel, Israel's ambassador to Sweden, tells his side of the story unapologetically. Along with other diplomats and VIPs, he was invited to the opening, at the National Historical Museum in Stockholm, of an exhibition at this and other venues called Making Differences, linked to a conference on how to prevent genocide. "They said to me, you've got to see this," Mazel tells me. "They led me into this inner courtyard. I could not believe my eyes - to see this sea of red blood and then the smiling face of this suicide bomber. I thought to myself, What does it mean, that there's this sea of still-fresh blood and she's smiling, and then I read the title and I saw that she's Snow White, meaning her sins have been washed away - and this is the blood of my brothers, my people." The floating photograph is of Palestinian trainee lawyer Hanadi Jaradat, 29, who murdered 21 people at the Maxim restaurant in Haifa, Israel, on October 4 last year. She also died herself. In the photo she is made up and gently smiling. Mazel continues: "I spoke to the museum's director and said it's not acceptable; it's inciting murder, it's the encouragement of genocide. He wouldn't close the exhibit so I said, 'I'll do it,' and I pulled the plugs of the spots out of their sockets. Then I pushed one of the spots into the pool." Rage rose in him like a sea of blood. "An ambassador was overtaken by his feelings," as he puts it. It was, he acknowledges, a release for his larger frustration with European attitudes to Israel ... Art vandalism is always a good story. Art vandalism by an ambassador against an artwork in the country with which he is employed to maintain diplomatic relations is something rarer - a new story. And this one just keeps growing. Ariel Sharon, Israel's prime minister, has publicly supported his ambassador, with some enthusiasm. "I think Zvi Mazel behaved in an appropriate way," Sharon announced. "I called ... and thanked him for his stand against the growing wave of anti-semitism." Passion is always attractive; reports around the world, especially in the Israeli and American press, have found in Mazel a popular hero, the undiplomatic diplomat, the man who decided to do something more committed than have a quiet word behind the scenes over the smorgasbord ... Death threats have been made against the artists. Only one of them, Dror Feiler, is prepared to speak in public, but you get the feeling he can take care of himself. Before leaving Israel, he was a paratrooper for three years in his country's army. "My family lives in Israel - why should I like suicide bombers? The fact that we try to explain terrorism doesn't mean that we forgive. It feels ridiculous to have to say it, but we condemn suicidal bombings." Feiler is as stoked up as the ambassador, and perhaps not entirely displeased by the hubbub. He is a political man, a prominent pro-Palestinian rights campaigner in Sweden. He, like everyone else at the museum, believes that far from being a spontaneous outburst, the high-level "hooliganism" was planned. He thinks his reputation drew attention to the piece: "I am a harsh critic of Israeli government policies" ... Israel has demanded the removal of the exhibit. This will not happen, insists the museum, unequivocally supported by the Swedish government. "Difficult and controversial works of art should be shown in public institutions like ours," the director, Kristian Berg, tells me. That Friday night, he ordered the ambassador to leave his museum - "mildly, of course". Outside, TV crews huddle over their equipment as Dror Feiler shows his work to Marita Ulvskog, Sweden's minister of culture. She doesn't say much, just looks gravely at him, then at the pool. They shake hands. Sweden's spin doctors are more relaxed than ours, and she gladly agrees to talk to the Guardian. "Our position is that we cannot accept that an ambassador or someone else is violently attacking a work of art. We can understand why somebody is angry or depressed by a work of art, but we cannot accept that you meet that anger with violence."

[Lawrence Small heads the Smithsonian museum and has served on the board of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council and is "chairman of the Financial Advisory Committee of Trans-Resources International, the parent company of Haifa Chemical, an Israeli firm."
Smithsonian Chief To Plead Guilty ...
Washington Post, January 20, 2004
"Smithsonian head Lawrence Small is expected to plead guilty later this week to a misdemeanor violation of the Migratory Bird Treaty Act. Yes birds. Small is a collector of Brazilian tribal art and he was charged after his art collection was found to "contain feathers from several protected species, including the jabiru, roseate spoonbill and crested caracara."

[The rich "Russian industrialist" below, Victor Vekselberg, is of course Jewish, yet another in a long, long Jewish line of art hoarders. The Jewish owner of Sotheby's, Alfred Taubman, stepped down a while ago after a price-fixing scandal.]
SOTHEBY'S ANNOUNCES PRIVATE SALE OF THE FORBES COLLECTION OF FABERGÉ TO RUSSIAN INDUSTRIALIST. MR. VICTOR VEKSELBERG PLANS TO RETURN THE EGGS TO RUSSIA,
Sotheby's, February 4, 2004
"Sotheby's announced today that the Forbes Collection of Fabergé, which had been scheduled to be sold at auction in New York on April 20th and 21st, has been sold privately to a prominent Russian industrialist, Mr. Victor Vekselberg, for an undisclosed amount. Prior to returning to Russia, highlights from the Collection, including the fabled nine Imperial Easter Eggs, will be on public exhibition at Sotheby's in New York, at a date to be announced shortly. Sotheby's negotiated this private transaction on behalf of the Forbes family. "This is an unanticipated and exceptional outcome," said Bill Ruprecht, President and Chief Executive Officer of Sotheby's Holdings, Inc. "We were very excited at the prospect of an extraordinary auction and magnificent pre-sale exhibition, but we knew that this remarkable offer and the return of the Fabergé Imperial Easter Eggs to Russia had to be taken very seriously. The Imperial Fabergé Easter Eggs as well as other objects from the Forbes Collection are among the most beautiful works of art ever created and we want to express our special thanks to Mr. Vekselberg for his agreement to have an exhibition of highlights from this historic collection at Sotheby's in New York, so that the public may have a final opportunity to view them prior to their return to Russia" ... Only 50 Imperial Easter Eggs are known to have been created by the House of Fabergé, and the Collection acquired by Mr. Vekselberg includes nine Fabergé Imperial Easter Eggs. They are the very first Imperial Egg, the Hen Egg, which was commissioned by Tsar Alexander III for his wife Tsarina Maria Feodorovna, and the last Easter egg he commissioned, the Renaissance Egg. It also includes the Rosebud Egg, which was the first egg the new Tsar, Nicholas II, commissioned for his wife Tsarina Alexandra. And, very importantly, the collection includes one of the most spectacular objects ever made by Fabergé - the Coronation Egg, which Nicholas II commissioned to present to his Tsarina on Easter in 1897 to commemorate his coronation in Moscow. Also among the Imperial Easter Eggs in this collection is the Fifteenth Anniversary Egg, commissioned on the occasion of the fifteenth anniversary of the coronation of Nicholas II. The four other magnificent Imperial Easter Eggs in this historic collection are The Lilies of the Valley Egg, the Cuckoo Egg, the Orange Tree Egg and the Order of St. George Egg ... Victor Vekselberg was born in 1957 in the Western Ukraine ... In 1996, he engineered the first interregional merger in the Russian metals industry, Siberian-Urals Aluminum Company (SUAL), where he remains Chairman of the Board of Directors. In 1997, he was key in building a Russian-United States partnership that acquired the controlling rights to Tyumen Oil Company (TNK), which soon became the third largest Russian oil and gas company. Acting as Chairman of the Executive Board of TNK, he was instrumental in negotiating and establishing a 50-50 joint venture with British Petroleum in the largest private transaction in Russian history."

[Bullshit. Helmut Newton was another rich Jewish quasi-pornographer/hustler who has had enormous influence in degrading women in the advertising business.]
Helmut Newton's vision. His life's work was ode to female power,
by Ginia Bellafante, New York Times (here at SF Gate), February 8, 2004
"Newton, who died two weeks ago in a car accident in Los Angeles at the age of 83, used to enjoy saying that he was not an intellectual and did not stand for much. But certainly he stood against anything that might get in the way of a woman's sexual gamesmanship ... Newton liked to position seminude women next to men armored in the costume of a suit. But it is always the men, so naked in their amorous ambition, who are rendered vulnerable to dangerously uncertain outcomes. Newton's photographs have been subject to all manner of misinterpretation, especially in the 1970s, when the women's movement understood most fashion images, particularly those of unclothed women taken by men, to be victimizing. Moreover, his opus offers women in neck braces, harnesses and leg casts and at least one wheelchair ... Newton was born to a wealthy Jewish family in Berlin in 1920 and set off for China in 1938 to escape Nazi persecution. "My mother was very capricious, but around 1935-36 she became a tower of strength," he wrote in his memoir. "The strength had left my father. I could see that." His mother engineered the release from Germany that saved his life. After stints in Singapore and Australia, where he met his wife and creative partner, June, Newton moved to Paris in the '50s to pursue the photography career he had begun as a teenager. He long betrayed a fascination with the kind of female body that did not come into vogue until the '90s. He had been a weak little boy, emasculated by his mother's insistence on dressing him in girlish velvet suits, and he fetishized articulated musculature in women. As Phyllis Posnick, the executive fashion editor of Vogue, put it, "He'd always say, 'Don't send me any of your scrawny, undernourished models.' " But Newton's influence on fashion extended beyond an interest in certain physical types. The ethos of decadence pervasive in Tom Ford's work is attributable in some part to Newton. Countless loopily reductive advertising campaigns -- Mario Sorrenti's women with dogs in leather masks for Ungaro -- and bad fashion shoots can trace their lineage to Newton, too. Perhaps what young imitators miss is that Newton understood what motivates a beautiful woman to gussy herself up. In his photographs women lose their cool when they are in the company of other women. The catfights he staged were not as much pornographic fantasy or camp play as they were a realization that women judge themselves most severely against members of their own sex."

[Continued world Jewish censorship of art. Recall the Israel ambassador's physical attack on a painting in the Swedish museum last month. Want to succeed in any art or entertainment field? The Jewish Lobby has your script for you. Ask for it on your way out.]
'Nazi Jew' row comic takes show to Paris street,
Expatica, February 20, 2004 [See also this story by the BBC]
"A French comedian vowed Friday to perform in a Paris street after a venue cancelled his show because of threats made by people offended by a recent "Nazi Jew" skit he performed on national television. Dieudonne M'Bala M'Bala - known simply as Dieudonne in France - told Europe 1 radio his impromptu routine outside the Olympia venue which scrapped his appearance was a protest in favour of artistic expression, and against the "censorship" he was facing. "This is the first time in France, I believe, that an artist has been banned from the stage like this," he said. The Olympia announced Wednesday it was reimbursing the 1,500 tickets sold for Dieudonne's show that was to have taken place Friday because of an apparently organised campaign of telephone calls and faxes opposing the performance. Some were sufficiently threatening that the police advised the hall would be jeopardising public safety if it did not implement onerous security measures, including X-ray machines and bag checks for explosives. A Paris judge Thursday rejected Dieudonne's bid to have the cancellation overturned. A French performers' union, the SFA, said it considered the Olympia's decision to be "an attack on freedom of expression". The uproar surrounding Dieudonne started December 1, when the comedian went on national television dressed as an Orthodox Jew and jokingly urged France's disaffected youths - many of them from Arab backgrounds - to "join the Axis of Good: the American-Zionist Axis." He finished the skit with a Nazi salute, saying "IsraeHeil". The incident elicited immediate outrage from French Jewish groups, a reprimand to the network from the broadcasting regulator, and a court hearing for Dieudonne that is yet to be set. Dieudonne, a 38-year-old atheist born in France of a French mother and a Cameroonian father, has repeatedly apologised to "people who might have been offended" by the skit, but insists he has always parodied various religious, political and ethnic groups in the name of humour but without malice. "I played an Israeli extremist - hey, they exist. I did not in any way talks about the Jewish community in France.... I spoke about Israel. But I think it's really tough to criticise the state of Israel today. That's the reality," he said. "I'm not anti-Semitic, I'm not racist," he said, adding that his career was now slipping away from him as a result of the campaign against him. The attention given to his show and its cancellation underlined the sensitivity surrounding France's 600,000-strong Jewish population - the biggest in Europe."

[Two-faced Jews declare their community is not fascistic while enforcing fascist tactics. It's endless and it's everywhere: the Jewish Nazi campaign of Totalitarian Thought Control and Book Burning. Don't mess with the Boss. (Jewish dominance of the art world, here.) THE GREATEST TABOO in Western society is the depiction of Jews in an unflattering light and any artist worth his or her salt who truly seeks to deconstruct Insane Convention ought to know by now that Jewish Power, Jewish Hypocrisy, and Jewish Myth are the heart of the problem.]
Artwork removed from Oslo exhibition after outraging Jews,
Haaretz (Israel), February 20, 20043
"A Norwegian art gallery removed a painting Friday from its exhibition "Anti-Semite in the Name of God," saying it had infuriated Jews, including a Holocaust survivor. The painting, by Norwegian artist Chris Reddy, includes the text "Israel" and "USA," with each "S" replaced by a Nazi Swastika. Andreas Engelstad, owner of the Galleri A Minor in Oslo, said the Israeli Embassy demanded that the painting be removed, but that it was the reaction of other Jews that prompted his decision. "I took it down not because of the Embassy, but out of respect for victims of the Holocaust," he told The Associated Press by telephone. "One of the victims called me and said they were hurt by the painting." The decision made top news in Norway on Friday, partly because it came just a month after a furious dispute between Israel and Sweden over an exhibition in Stockholm that enraged the Israeli ambassador there. That exhibit showed the picture of a Palestinian suicide bomber, and so outraged Israeli Ambassador Zvi Mazel that he tried to damage it by throwing a light fixture at it. In Norway, Israeli Ambassador Liora Herzl sent a letter to the gallery, saying Reddy's painting was unacceptable because it linked Israel and the United States to Nazism. Norwegian news agency NTB said Reddy was furious at the decision to remove his artwork. "It is questionable that Ambassador Liora Herzl has taken the fascists' tool, censorship, into use," he was quoted as saying. He could not immediately be reached for comment by the AP. Engelstad said Reddy's exhibition seeks to use a variety of artworks to illustrate how political and religious forces influence a person's thinking. None of the other works was deemed offensive and will remain on display until March 7, he said."

Choice for G-G arts award raises some hackles,
The Globe and Mail (Canada), Friday, March 5, 2004
"Some protests were logged yesterday with the Canada Council for the Arts, which recently selected the controversial artist Istvan Kantor (a.k.a. Monty Cantsin) as a winner of the Governor-General's Award for Visual and Media Arts. Kantor gained notoreity (and a lifetime ban from the National Gallery in Ottawa) for one specialty, using his own blood to paint on gallery walls. Donna Balkan, senior communication manager with the Canada Council, said yesterday she received about 10 calls of protest for Kantor's $15,000 prize. "Frankly, we've received more calls from the media than we have from the public." David Poole, who heads the council's media arts section, defended Kantor as a recipient. "The decision was made by a jury of artists and people who work in the arts based on the fact that this is an artist . . . who makes a really strong case for the place of the individual in a society and he does that by, in effect, signing himself in places. It's a way of putting himself, as a disembodied artist, in a technological, mediated society."

[Jewish dominance of the art world, here.]
Big two meet stiff French resistance,
Telegraph (UK), March 22, 2004
"When the barricades that France's protectionist auctioneers had erected to prevent the reform of their art market were finally stormed in late 2001, it seemed as though revolution was in the air. Many people believed that "les Anglo-Saxons", as the French refer to Sotheby's and Christie's, were about to sweep their smaller, local competitors aside. The logic was simple. The 456 licensed French auctioneers (commissaires-priseurs), who had been legally protected against foreign competition since 1556, would be no match for the two international giants now that the latter were allowed to hold sales in France for the first time. However, the reality has proved very different and in less than two and a half years Paris has evolved into the world's most unpredictable and fiercely competitive art market centre. Although Sotheby's and Christie's took about 20 per cent of the market in Paris last year, the French auction houses have not collapsed in the face of foreign competition and the best are prospering in the new era. In 2003, four of them - Tajan, ArtCurial, Calmels Cohen and Piasa - outsold Sotheby's and gave Christie's, which moved into top position in Paris for the first time, a run for its money. ArtCurial sold the most expensive work of art auctioned in France last year, an Egyptian diorite torso from the fourth century BC, which fetched more than £1.3 million, and the country's most expensive lot, a 1929 Mercedes car, which sold for more than £2 million. Calmels Cohen staged the two most spectacular auctions of the year, the £31 million André Breton estate and the £5.8 million Jean Arp sale, although it has not yet announced anything comparable for 2004."

[Author of this article? Jewish. Head of the Whitney Museum? Jewish. At least one of the three curators? Jewish. Most "controversial" artist in he show? Jewish. Self-defined "fetishistic materialism?" Jewish.]
Whitney Biennial A Show the Critics Usually Love to Pan, and for Good Reason,
By LEE ROSENBAUM, Wall Street Journal, March 23, 2004; Page D8
"Judging by the early reviews, the art pundits are giving a thumbs up to the traditionally put-down exhibition. One can only wonder why. The works in this year's installment, on view through May 30, are no better and, to my eyes, somewhat less interesting than those arrayed in the museum's previous two shows of recent American art, both of which were less charitably treated by the critics. But this year's favorable buzz must have been music to the ears of dealers selling such fare at the recent sixth-annual Armory Show on two Hudson River piers. This mega-fair proffered contemporary work from 189 galleries around the world. Opening concurrently with the Armory Show for the first time, this became the inaugural Whitney Buy-ennial: Art lovers could pick their favorites at the museum, then hop a free shuttle bus to the fair, where works by 64 of the 108 Biennial artists were up for sale. This year's Biennial may have escaped serious censure in part because there's no one at the Whitney to kick around anymore. In keeping with its sorry tradition of revolving-door directors, the museum lost its former head, Maxwell Anderson, last September and its affable new one, Adam Weinberg, bears no responsibility for this survey's selections. No one has yet been churlish enough to pummel the triumvirate of earnest, low-profile young female curators who made this year's picks -- Chrissie Iles, Shamim Momin and Debra Singer ... "The subject of Sept. 11 came up in every artist's studio I visited," Ms. Singer observed ... No Whitney Biennial would be complete without a controversy-provoking object. Hearing no nominations, I designate David Altmejd's "Delicate Men in Positions of Power." This room-sized, mixed-media installation features a recumbent decomposing werewolf, on whose bones two words, "climb" and "grab," are crudely penned, each beside a scrawled Star of David. The Star appears again as an elegant silver object, encased in a vitrine. Resplendent with jewels and crystals, the installation, together with its title, seems to suggest an allegory about the festering werewolf lurking within power-hungry, fetishistically materialistic Jews. In conversation, the artist did not dispute this interpretation, allowing that the piece involved "a fascination with all those things, very separately." He also acknowledged that the words and the symbol were meant to be charged, and that the piece involved politics and activism. "I wouldn't use the Star of David if I was not Jewish," he added."

[Jews, art, and their fabled fixation on psychoanalysis. What is "art?" And what is "quality" art? The Jewi$h Culture Cabal defines it for you.]
The Guardian profile: Lucian Freud, With an exhibition of his work on show at the Wallace Collection, the grandson of Sigmund Freud is being feted as the equal of Titian, Rubens and Velázquez - a man whose work proves him to be an old master trapped in modern times,
by Jonathan Jones, Guardian (UK), April 2, 2004
"The Director of the Louvre sat behind a Napoleonic desk overlooking the pollarded trees of the Tuileries, and delivered an exciting piece of news. Lucian Freud, Professor Pierre Rosenberg of the Académie Française told me with pride, had been working in his museum. Few artists attain the same respect in their lifetime as is given to the 81-year-old Freud. Respect not just from fellow artists or lovers of contemporary art, but from museums around the world who treat this violent, deliberately ugly and ungainly portrayer of the naked human body as a titan, securely established in the great tradition of Chardin, Manet and Degas, rather than a contemporary whose reputation has yet to be tried by time ... Neither age nor reverence has soothed the ungainliness and anger that, as a painter, Freud brings into the bedroom. Freud's women are not exactly flattered by his brush. The blotches and bruises have a caricatural nastiness. Yet, there's an unequivocal sexuality to these octogenarian paintings - a hunger. He feels the same about the plate of four boiled eggs in another of his paintings. Freud is as severe and unforgiving now as when he first exhibited in London during the second world war. He certainly had every reason to be serious as a young man. He was born in Berlin in 1922. As Jews, his family had to flee in 1933 ... There is another pertinent fact about Freud: his grandfather was the founder of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud. Quoting Schiller, the elder Freud declared in his 1910 essay on Leonardo da Vinci: "When psychiatric research, normally content to draw on frailer men for its material, approaches one who is among the greatest of the human race, 'to blacken the radiant and drag the sublime into the dust' is no part of its purpose." He went on to diagnose Da Vinci as a mother-fixated narcissist so horrified by sex that he entirely sublimated his sexuality into research. The way Lucian Freud guards his privacy makes sense if he grew up with an awareness of what psychoanalysis could do with a few personal asides in an artist's notebooks. And yet if any living artist exhibits a healthy - or maybe unhealthy - Freudian libido, it is Freud. He is not sensual in the way Titian is. The sensuality of Freud is of chilly underheated studios, dirty rags, London. This is one way, says Desmond Shawe-Taylor, the director of the Dulwich Picture Gallery, that Freud is different from the old masters. "It's my prejudice, but I think that there is something about the use of paint in the old masters, that they had this delight and beauty. I don't see that in Freud. Maybe I'm missing something, but I see a slight distaste. It's very sexy in a way, but sexy despite yourself." Freud's paintings are grotesque and erotic. For him the ugly is the beautiful. Everyone is ugly, and every body intrigues him. Everyone looks pretty dreadful in his new paintings, and yet these are pictures of fascination. Freud inhabits a world of heroic freaks ... MacGregor has breakfast with Freud every few months to see his work in progress. He points out that the painter dresses in a way grimly appropriate to his pictures; he wears a butcher's apron. It's not just sex that preoccupies Freud. His interest in the body is more mysterious than that."

Painter wins new award,
By ALEXANDRA GILL, The Globe and Mail, September 9, 2004
"Victoria painter Mark Neufeld is off to Berlin after winning the inaugural $25,000 Joe Plaskett Foundation Award, one of the largest visual-arts awards in Canada. The new annual prize, eligible to students across Canada who are studying for their master of fine arts, or have attained an MFA this year, is designed to support a one-year residence in Europe. Most notable about the award -- besides its rich purse -- is that it is only available to painters. When the first biennial $50,000 Sobey Art Award was announced two years ago, not one of the five finalists were painters. "I suppose painting has been somewhat eclipsed in the contemporary art world, maybe more so in Canada than other places," says Neufeld, before receiving the award yesterday at the Emily Carr Institute of Art + Design in Vancouver. Neufeld, 32, a student in the master of fine arts program at University of Victoria and graduate of Emily Carr, plans to go to Berlin after his graduation this spring to study alongside a new generation of German artists that include Thomas Scheibitz and Franz Ackerman."

[This is a few months old: propaganda as "art" in a tax-supported public institution (the Boston Public Library). In the interests of fair play, why isn't a future photographic exhibit entitled: ISRAEL WITH A FROWN?]
Zionist House/Israel Cultural Center and The Consulate General of Israel to New England Present Our Country: Israel with a Smile,
Israeli Embassy (Boston)
"An exhibit featuring the photographs of renowned Israeli photographer Alex Levac On display now through June 17 at the Boston Public Library Concourse Level For more information, call Zionist House at 617.267.3600"

"Too Jewish - Not Jewish Enough," a thought-provoking exhibit by 23 artists who are members of the Jewish Artist Initiative,
Yahoo (Business Wire), September 28, 2004
"The title of this show refers to the controversial exhibition, "Too Jewish", organized by Norman Kleeblatt for The Jewish Museum in New York. Mr. Kleeblatt's show addressed issues of Jewish identity, and many of the artists presented images of how Jews and Judaism are portrayed in the media. Like many exhibitions of the last twenty years, "Too Jewish" referenced the changing cultural landscape for Jews living in America. "Too Jewish - Not Jewish Enough" offers an alternative to the idea that Jewish subject matter is limited to issues of identity. Artists utilize an array of media to capture different forms of expression that includes a diverse collection of painting, sculpture, photography, printmaking, ceramics, book art, and digital work. Some reference Jewish themes, while others choose to work within art historical contexts, while adhering to a Jewish sensibility ... WHO: Speaking at the opening reception will be Ruth Weisberg, dean of the School of Fine Arts at the University of Southern California (USC). Exhibiting artists include: Joshua Abarbanel, Bill Aron, Pat Berger, Tony Berlant, Elizabeth Bloom, Nicole Cohen, Joyce Dallal, Barbara Drucker, Sam Erenberg, Benny Ferdman, Carol Goldmark, Laurie Gross, Gilah Yelin Hirsch, Channa Horwitz, Karen Koblitz, Deborah Lefkowitz. Eitan Mendelowitz, Laurel Paley, Victor Raphael, Elena Siff, Ruth Weisberg, Seth Weissman, Eugene Yelchin. WHY: The underlying goal of the Jewish Artist Initiative is to identify the needs of artists whose work is informed by their Jewish identity and culture, and to develop mechanisms for meeting those needs. This group of artists has been meeting for the past nine months sharing perspectives on what it means to be a Jewish artist and ways in which they can have an impact on Jewish cultural life."

[So, um, what would impoverished Van Gogh say about all the modern money drool over his paintings, wherein they have become economic investments and little more? We think Van Gogh's heirs should get their ten cents. To Hell with rich Jews making millions off Van Gogh paintings. In a legal world invented to enhance Jewish power, exploitation, and aggrandizement, want to talk sincerely about reparations? Same paradigm on a much bigger scale: Give the Palestinians back their stolen land.]
Byrne Goldenberg & Hamilton PLLC - Complaint in van Gogh ownership case of Orkin et. al. v. Elizabeth Taylor filed today in California,
Yahoo, October 13, 2004
"The heirs of a victim of Nazi persecution in Hitler's Germany during the 1930's today filed a lawsuit against film star Elizabeth Taylor in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California to recover a van Gogh painting. This lawsuit responds to a case that Ms. Taylor filed in May 2004 seeking a declaration that she is the owner of the Painting "View of the Asylum and Chapel at Saint-Remy", which she bought at Sotheby's in London in 1963. "We are asserting that Ms. Taylor was negligent and careless when she bought the Painting", said Andrew J. Orkin, a Canadian attorney and Mrs. Mauthner's great-grandson. "Our Complaint charges that she ignored numerous conspicuous 'red flags' in 1963 that the Painting had likely been confiscated from a victim of Nazi persecution." "The historical record establishes that Margarete Mauthner and her family fled Berlin, Germany to South Africa in 1939 as refugees from Nazi persecution, after having lost most of their property as a result of Nazi economic and political coercion," added Orkin. Today's lawsuit states that Mrs Mauthner also lost the Painting as a direct consequence of Nazi pressure, and is therefore legally entitled to reclaim it under the 1998 U.S. Holocaust Victims Redress Act ... "The Sotheby's sales brochure for the Painting when Ms. Taylor bought it in 1963 specifically identified the 1939 catalogue raisonne, which established that Mrs. Mauthner owned the Painting in the late 1930's", Hamilton added. "The Complaint says that had either Ms. Taylor or her father - a professional art dealer who was acting as her agent - even bothered to review this single page in the de la Faille catalogue raisonne in 1963, they could not have missed the Painting's Nazi taint."

US authorities seize 10 million dollar Picasso stolen by Nazis,
Yahoo News, October 26, 2004
"US authorities have seized a long-lost painting by Spanish artist Pablo Picasso worth about 10 million dollars that was looted by Nazis during World War II, the FBI said. Federal Bureau of Investigation and US Marshals from Los Angeles seized the painting, called "Femme en Blanc" from the home of its owner in Chicago on October 21 following a complaint that it was stolen property. The painting, also known as "Femme Assise" or "Seated Woman," was "arrested" on the grounds that it was stolen property that had been illegally shipped from one US state to another by a Chicago resident, prosecutors said. The work was painted by Picasso around 1922 and sold to a German Jew, Carlota Landsberg, in 1926 or 1927, who sent it to a Paris dealer for safekeeping during World War II. But in 1940, at the start of the German occupation of France, the painting was allegedly looted from the art dealer and not seen publicly again until late 2001, when it appeared at a Los Angeles exhibition, court documents state. A complaint filed in US federal court in Los Angeles alleges that tracking by the London based Art Loss Register revealed that the painting was sold to a Paris art dealer by a collector who was investigated for benefiting from sales to the Nazis. In 1975, the art dealer sold the painting to a Paris art gallery that in turn sold it to American buyers Marilynn Alsdorf and her late husband James, who lives in Chicago and who has owned it ever since. After the painting was exhibited in Los Angeles, the gallery that showed the work sent it to Switzerland in an attempt to sell it on behalf of Marilynn Alsdorf, the complaint said. But a routine investigation into its origins revealed it had been stolen by the Nazis, and Alsdorf and the San Francisco area-based grandson of the painting's first owner, Landsberg, were informed of its history. Landsberg's grandson Thomas Bennigson then sued Alsdorf in late 2002 to recover the painting for his family, but Alsdorf allegedly arranged for the work to be transported from Los Angeles back to her Chicago home."

[The sick modern art world is, like so much else, largely a Jewish economic fiefdom. This Jew who literally vomits out colors onto famous paintings got a major Canadian art award last Spring. Modern art increasingly has no meaning except disoriented decadence. It is disconnected from the masses, it is self-obsessed and destructive to everything around it, and it holds principal allegiance to a specialized in-house voodoo jargon and a narrow cabal of "art" high priests and priestesses. Why wouldn't this guy get prestigious awards for just puking? Jews dominate the scene. See here and here.]
Blood artist strikes again, in Berlin. Canadian who attacked National Gallery works takes on Michael Jackson statue,
by Cecily Ross, Globe and Mail, December 2, 2004
"Canada's contribution to the world of blood-and-guts culture has taken his anti-art message on the road.This time, bad boy Istvan Kantor, best known as the man who was banned from the National Gallery of Canada in the 1990s for tossing a vial of his own blood on the walls, has turned up in Berlin where he sprayed more of his bodily fluids at a statue of Michael Jackson yesterday. Kantor made headlines last spring when he won the Governor-General's Award for Visual and Media Arts for his videos, performance art and installations. The jury declared the 55-year-old Kantor a "no-holds-barred neo-Dada artist." At the time, the award was greeted with outrage. The artist is also known for vomiting primary colours on famous paintings -- a practice he refers to as "ur-transgression," and performance pieces involving burning clothes irons. His feature-length film, which aired in May, depicted a couple in bondage gear and masks humping to the tune of screeching techno sound and writhing about in a pile of blood (or worse). Whatever you call it, The Globe's art critic, Sarah Milroy, wrote: "It's nasty." "I am protesting against the loss of independence in art," Kantor is reported to have cried after attempting to fling blood on the golden-coloured statue of Michael Jackson and his monkey Bubbles. Right now, the Hungarian-born performance artist, who currently lives in Berlin, may be cooling his heels in a German jail. Security guards hustled Kantor out of the museum and police booked him for disturbing the peace and property damage, although reports say that the statue by American sculptor Paul McCarthy was not hit in Kantor's bloody attack. The statue is part of a collection of 2,500 contemporary works belonging to Friedrich Christian Flick on display at the Hamburger Bahnhof museum. The exhibition is at least as controversial in Berlin as Kantor's own body of work is here. Many oppose the exhibition on the grounds that Flick is heir to a Nazi-era arms supplier. Also known as Monty Cantsin, Kantor was banned from the Art Gallery of Ontario for vomiting on a painting in 1996. Six months later he repeated the performance at New York's Museum of Modern Art. At the time he said he was protesting the "oppressively trite and painfully banal" nature of the works in question -- Raoul Dufy's Harbour at le Havre and Piet Mondrian's Composition in Red, White and Blue, respectively ... Kantor, who moved to Montreal in 1977 to escape the oppressiveness of Communism in his native Hungary, told the Times that returning to the National Gallery, the scene of his earlier banishment, was "a revenge for me. My work was always anti-establishment, anti-art art, anti-authoritarian and now, suddenly, I have been recognized by the same people

 


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