'Their Feelings Should Matter More'

There's a kind of hierarchical proprietary interest. Let's just look at the World Trade Center, for instance. Clearly, it's more personal to firemen and to bond traders. And for people like me, living on the Upper West Side [of Manhattan], I respect that. While it happened on this island, it claimed the lives of a particular kind of people, and I have much more respect for the feelings of the wives of firemen and of bond traders than for my own opinion.

The Holocaust claimed 11 million lives, 6 million of which were Jews, and when it comes to making art out of this atrocity, really so soon, 50 years later, while there are still survivors alive, their feelings ought to matter more.

Even though we typically grant artists creative license to take aesthetic liberties, there are some places, because they are simply unimaginable, that an artist simply can't take someone to. It's sheer arrogance to think otherwise. Some acts of atrocity are on such an enormous scale that they are like Mount Sinai experiences. They're moments of revelation that you treat like a sacred fire.

The Holocaust and other events of genocide -- the Middle Passage, for example, the delivery of Africans to the West -- these are things that, when subjected to artistic treatment, have to be done with great faithfulness, fidelity, respect, and humility. The people for whom these events are most personal -- the people who have the most intimate knowledge of these tragedies -- their feelings should simply matter more.

"Ahead of its time" assumes that this exhibit has value that we just can't see right now. But even the Jewish museum isn't saying this exhibit has aesthetic value, which to me is the most appalling position of all. They say they're displaying something that has found its way into the culture somehow and that this stuff conveys some kind of important political message. Who knows what the message is? The commercialization of the Holocaust? I thought art museums, by definition, were in the business of promoting art, not purely political messages.

Even if we could take the position that there is aesthetic value here -- which I don't think we can if even the museum doesn't see it -- then this political message being expressed by these artists is just indecently premature. [Simple human decency demands that they wait] until survivors die out -- and that's still 20 years away. And, look, there are people who say the children of survivors shouldn't be subjected to this.

I'm sort of surprised -- maybe I shouldn't be given the rapidness and fluidness of our culture -- that these images are with us so soon. I thought you'd need 100 years before these kinds of desecrating acts would be seen as appropriate.

Well, I making pretty much a full indictment of the show, because the specific pieces are just so transgressive that they essentially contaminate everything in the museum. I'm thinking about the LEGO Concentration Camp Set, the Giftgas Giftset that features Zyklon-B canisters , the Prada Deathcamp, the doctored photo at Buchenwald..

Continued on page 2: »