ISRAEL SHAMIR

A Study of Art

2 October 2003
shamir@home.se


Wandering on the great peninsula of Peloponnese I drove into the
medieval-looking town of Nauplio. Its harbour is guarded by a
grey-walled islet, cosy cafes line up the waterfront, while behind them,
narrow and curvy lanes rapidly climb up the steep mount, crowned by a
Venetian fort. City streets are fresh and dainty, and preserve the
proverbial charm of Greece. There are not many places on the Greek
mainland that so effortlessly captivate a stranger. Greeks call it
'Nafplio', probably in honour of Nafnaf the Pig. Unusual for Greece, it
was built up by Crusaders on their way to Jaffa and Acre, sculpted by
Venetians, Turks, French and Bavarians, ruled by Duke of Athens. Nauplio
was for a short while a first capital of independent Greece, but
mercifully was spared the grim fate of Athens: it did not become a
centre of overcrowded honking urban spread.

It is a good base to scout the plain of Argolis. On its main square,
there is an old Venetian building. It houses now the local
archaeological museum. Its collection starts with the great Mycenaean
civilisation, a child of Minoan civilisation of Crete. This art
blossomed not far away, in the walled cities of Mycenae and Tiryns, once
ruled by the accursed Atreid kings. It is a period of wonderful free and
inspired art, with voluptuous (like Baroque nymphs crowding the ceiling
of my hotel room) figurines of goddesses, jolly octopuses (octopi for
Jennifer) on the jars, and frescoes reminiscent of Palestinian work in
Deir el-Balach. Mycenaeans could read and write, built castles and
palaces, carved the magnificent lions above the gate of their capital.
But as one continues the tour, all of a sudden one witnesses the great
collapse. Art disappears, and its place is taken over by bare geometric
forms. Centuries will pass ? from 12 c BC to 6 c BC, until local
inhabitants will regain the developed forms of art, knowledge of writing
and sophistication of old.

One feels this lacuna of time while reading Odyssey. Homer composed his
anachronistic masterpiece some four hundred years after the collapse,
and he did not know that his heroes could write and read, and their
princesses did not have to do laundry by themselves. After the collapse,
one finds pieces of art strangely similar to our modern creations. In
the small museum of Acropolis in Athens, there is a precise copy of
Giacometti statuette, made some 2700 years ago. Geometric forms of that
period are reproduced now as best examples of modern art. Thus, in the
small museum of Nauplio, I found a missing piece to fit into the puzzle.
Death of Art is a symptom of civilisation collapse.

For another piece of the puzzle, I travelled to the other end of Europe,
to the Basque capital Bilbao, where the great Jewish American family of
Guggenheim built a huge museum of modern art. It is probably the biggest
building erected in modern Spain, looking like a flagman of the merchant
fleet entering the shore of Biscay. Its forms are unique, there are no
right angles, and curves are too complicated and defy easy definition.
It is a building that intends to impress and it impresses you as a
spacecraft on the village street.

Inside, it is less imposing. Some pieces of corrugated iron, video
screens, bare geometric forms are being offered as the chef-d'ouvres of
the modern art. A New York artist brought here fifteen ton of rusty iron
plates, a Japanese artist has a big room where dozens of TV screens show
endless emptiness. Four large floors of nothing are surmounted by the
fifth floor, displaying the collection of Armani suits. Every piece
could be easily interchanged for another one. There is no 'Rafael of
rusty iron', an artist as creator of art disappeared and gave place to
the museum curator, the collection owner. It is he who decides what sort
of junk will be displayed, whose name will be written under the photo of
tinned soup or a dead rat. Only Armani brand reigns supreme, impervious
to curator's will, or perhaps it is the curator's ideal art.

The museum of Modern Art in Bilbao was supposed to contain Gernica,
Picasso's modern version of the Last Judgement. Instead, it is stuffed
with corrugated iron. It is a good place to contemplate the present
decay, nay, demise of the European visual art. As good as any, for the
example set by Guggenheim is followed everywhere. In Biennale of Venice,
Belgians exhibit a row of chairs, Japanese ? two hundred yards of photo
of a cell, Israelis ? bookshelves with yesteryear cheap books, English ?
trashed old cars. On my way through Milan, I passed by a lorry carrying
a dozen of flattened car wrecks to the scrap yard. It could make a good
object of art for Biennale, as well as a heap of garbage. I am sure
nobody would find it out of place if it would be provided with a name of
artist, his country and his media.

In Amsterdam museum I saw a collection of rotten decomposed pig trunks.
Newspapers wrote that a certain trunk immersed in formaldehyde took
fancy of an American private collector and was sold for fifty thousand
dollars. It became a piece of art by decision of two Mammonites, the
curator and the collector. In St Nicolas Church of Copenhagen, instead
of inspirational images of Madonna (banned from the church by the good
Protestants) I saw huge full colour photograph of naked old and sick
woman, next to a door-size print of female genitals, next to a photo of
homosexual oral act. A church in Amsterdam had an exhibition of beach
snapshots. It carried a double message: the church has to be profaned as
well as art, and it achieved their double purpose ? churches of
Amsterdam and Copenhagen stay empty, and their artists produce junk.

How come these nauseating prints or rotten cadavers or cheap porn are
considered a form of art? The Modern Art predecessors, Gustave Courbet
and Edouard Manet, rebelled against Romantic rejection of real life and
real Man. The pioneers of Modern Art, Marcel Duchamp and Kazimir
Malevich, intended to épater le bourgeois, to extend the borders of art,
to show limitless spirit of Man. But their paradoxical joke 'everything
placed in a museum is art' was taken with dead seriousness and accepted
for truth.

It was a good principle for Guggenheims, this great family that
established Modern Art museums in New York, Bilbao, Venice. They had
enough money to build a museum, they knew what they liked, and they did
not mind to become the supreme arbiter. Guggenheim became the brand name
in art. Whatever they proclaimed as art, was art. In the beginning,
these were works of some dubious value like 'abstract painting' of
Jackson Pollock, and eventually we came to rotten swine, corrugated iron
and Armani suits. Art was destroyed.

II

A day drive from Bilbao, in the old royal city of Leon, one sees the
masterpiece of stained glass in the Cathedral, one of the oldest and
most wonderful in Europe. Churches and temples were the first and most
important depositories of art, and art was produced for them. They were
not 'customers' in a way a modern bank orders a painting from an artist.
Visual art is inherently connected to temples and churches, it is a form
of exquisite worship, proclaiming affinity of God and Man. The walls of
Kremlin churches are covered with medieval Russian icons; in churches of
Italy one finds a Caravaggio or Rafael painting, divinely human faces of
Buddhist images shine from the niches in Pagan and Kyoto temples.
Perfect marble bodies of Aphrodite, serene faces of the Virgin, severe
images of Christ, gracious forms of Buddha in Theravada temples were the
prevailing form of pre-modern art.

The artists are still inspired by God, and still ready to build
cathedrals and fill them with painting proclaiming our love of God. The
Starry Night of van Gogh could be an altar-piece, Gauguin painted but
Nativity and Paradise in Tahiti; and the Dove of Picasso is the one that
John the Baptist saw on the banks of Jordan River. Gaudi spent years of
his life to create the uncompleted Barcelona Cathedral, while on the
other end of Europe, in the one-thousand-years-old first capital of
Russian civilisation, Kiev, the unique St Vladimir Cathedral was built
and decorated. Outside, this cathedral is quite an ordinary church in
Byzantine tradition, but inside it is a miracle. All the walls and
ceilings of the church are decorated with frescoes by the great painters
of the fin-de-ciecle, Surikov, Nesterov, Vrubel. It is the Sistine
Chapel of the Eastern Christendom, and it is almost contemporary with
Malevich.

The Russian painters used the traditional scheme and subjects of
Orthodox church decoration, but their manner of painting was new,
strong, fresh. Who knows, if the Soviet revolution of 1917 would not be
so brutally anti-Christian, the great fire of Christendom could be lit
again by the Russians. It did not happen, and the Russian churches were
destroyed, turned into warehouses, or ? in case of St Vladimir Cathedral
? into a Museum of Atheism. But the spirit did not die so easily, and
the noble and inspired Pilots and Sportsmen of Deineka, a Russian Soviet
painter of 1930s, and of his Nordic contemporaries, proclaimed divinity
of Man created in God's Image. Nowadays it is contemptuously called the
Totalitarian Art, though Stalin and Voroshilov by Gerasimov is not more
totalitarian than Napoleon by David or Henry the Fourth by Rubens.

There is no totalitarian art, but the totalitarian regime in art,
totalitarian domination of single tendency in visual art connected with
virtual ban of other tendencies. For Guggenheim curators and for the
modern art critics, only their 'art' is acceptable, while figurative art
is ostracised.

A leading figure of British art establishment, Ivan Massow, the Chairman
of the Institute of Contemporary Arts, rose against this totalitarian
trend. In an article in the New Statesman titled It's All Hype, he noted
the totalitarian regime established by the closed gang of art curators:

Totalitarian states have an official art, a chosen aesthetic that is
authorized and promoted at the cost of other, competing styles. In the
Soviet Union, the official art was socialist realism. Working in any
other mode was considered - and treated as - an act of subversion. In
Britain, too, we have an official art - concept art - and it performs an
equally valuable service. It is endorsed by Downing Street, sponsored by
big business and selected and exhibited by cultural tsars such as the
Tate's Nicholas Serota who dominate the arts scene from their crystal
Kremlins. Together, they conspire both to protect their mutual
investments and to defend the intellectual currency they've invested in
this art.

Massow noticed the damage it causes, for the artists are forced to fit
into Procrustean bed of this anti-art:

It seems sad that so many talented young artists, clawing to be noticed
for their craft, are forced to ditch their talent and reinvent
themselves as creators of video installations, or a machine that
produces foam in the middle of a room, in order to be recognized as
contemporary artists. In this, if nothing else, the arts establishment
is guilty of conspiring to make concept art synonymous with contemporary
art.

Thousands of young artists wait in the wings to see whether the taste
arbiters will relinquish their exclusive fascination with concept art.
It's a crime. We need art lovers to tell artists that they're not
obliged to reinvent themselves into creators of piles of crap, or pass
their work around like samizdat.

He felt that he is breaking the rules of the game:

By outing this opinion in public, I realize that there will be plenty of
people waiting, like Madame Defarge with her knitting needles next to
the guillotine, for my head to roll into their laps. The 'arts
establishment' (what a weirdly oxymoronic phrase that is) is
terrifyingly powerful and, like all centres of power, it is no friend to
heterodoxy.

His prediction materialised: immediately after the publication of the
article he was sacked and ostracised by the British art establishment
led by the Jewish cultural tsar Nicholas Serota, and by the Jewish art
collector and advertising magnate, a friend of Pinochet, Thatcher and
Conrad Black, Charles Saatchi. His power is unique, and an art critic,
Norman Rosenthal of the British Royal Academy suggested that "the
Saatchis are probably the most important collectors of modern art in
anywhere in the world."[i]

III

"Does it matter that they are Jewish?", asks the annoyed reader. "So
there are a few Jews in the thoroughly anti-Christian, profane,
totalitarian world of modern art. So what? They are still a tiny
minority". Well, not really.

The large database on Jewish influence in the US,
www.jewishtribalreview.org gives following names and numbers
(Incidentally, the database uses exclusively Jewish sources):

The Jewish influence in modern art is well attended. By 1973, some
estimated that 75-80% of the 2500 core "art market' personnel of the
United States - art dealers, art curators, art critics, and art
collectors -- were Jewish[ii]. In 2001, according to ARTnews, at least
eight of the "Top Ten" US art collectors were Jewish: Debbie and Leon
Black, Edythe and Eli Broad, Doris and Donald Fisher, Ronnie and Samuel
Heyman, Marie-Josee and Henry R. Kravitz, Evelyn and Leonard Lauder, Jo
Carole and Ronald S. Lauder, and Stephen Wynn.

"Today," wrote Gerald Krefetz in 1982, "... Jews enjoy every phase of
the art world: as artists, dealers, collectors, critics, curators,
consultants, and patrons. In fact, the contemporary art scene has a
strong Jewish flavour. In some circles, the wheelers and dealers are
referred to as the Jewish mafia since they command power, prestige, and
most of all, money."

In 1996, Jewish art historian Eunice Lipton explained that she went into
a career of an art historian in order to be in a field dominated by
Jews:

"I wanted to be where Jews were -- that is, I wanted a profession that
would allow me tacitly to acknowledge my Jewishness through the company
I kept."[iii] The field of art history... was filled with Jews. One
might even say it was shaped by them[iv].

At the Metropolitan Museum of New York, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger (former
publisher of the New York Times) eventually became its chairman. He
oversaw an institution in which Jews, says George Goodman, "have
enriched every area of the Museum's collections, including pre-Colombian
ceramics (Nathan Cummings), African art (Klaus Perls), ancient
Mediterranean and Middle Easter Art (Norbert Schimmel), Old Masters
Paintings (Lore and Rudolph Heinemann), French decoration arts (Belle
and Sol Linsky) modern European Art (Florence May Schoenborn), modern
American art (Muriel Kallis Steinberg Newman; Edith and Milton
Lowenthal), Indonesian bronzes (Samuel Eilenberg), and South and
Southeast Asian Art (Enid Haupt and Lita Hazen, Walter Annenberg's
sisters).[v] Throughout the Met too, galleries, rooms, theatres, and
gardens are named after Jewish sponsors including Iris and B. Gerald
Canter, Helene and Michael David-Weill, Lawrence and Barbara Fleishman,
Howard Gilman, Leon Levy, Henry R. Kravis, Janice H. Levin, Carroll and
Milton Petrie, Arthur, Mortimer, and Raymond Sacker, Laurence Tisch, and
Ruth and Harold Uris. (Among the various Jewish curators at the Museum
is Barbara Weinberg, head of American Paintings and Sculpture).

By the 1980s, four of the ten board members that dole out the MacArthur
Foundation "genius awards" were also Jewish; two Jews also sat on the
board of the Russell Sage Foundation.[vi] The Kaplan Fund has also had
an important impact on the art community in divvying out awards. One of
J. M. Kaplan's daughters was the Chairman of the New York State Arts
Council.[vii] Joan Kaplan Davidson was appointed as chairman of the $34
million New York State Art Council in 1975 despite the fact that she was
"not professionally trained in the arts." Her mother, Alice Kaplan, was
once president of the American Federation of the Arts.

The Getty Museum, founded by the non-Jewish oil mogul, J. Paul Getty
(and with $4 billion of funds, the richest museum on earth) has
consistently had Jews at the economic helm. In 1998, after 17 years,
Harold Williams left the presidency of the J. Paul Getty Trust.
Williams, notes George Goodman, was "raised in a Labor Zionist home in
East Los Angeles."[viii]. The new president of the J. Paul Getty Trust
is another Jewish administrator, Barry Munitz, formerly the chancellor
of both the California State University system and the University of
Houston.

The fact that Jews are so dominating in the art world is very rarely
publicly acknowledged. It is forbidden -- as always for anyone, anywhere
-- to discuss the subject for fear of being branded "anti-Semitic."
Typically, as example, an entire 1989 academic volume on the "Sociology
of the Arts" fails to mention Jews as sociological entity in the modern
art dynamic. There are analyses of art galleries, "artist groups," art
patrons, and art audiences, broken down into gender, age, income,
occupation, and even "racial and ethnic minorities." We can find that,
negligibly, "blacks, Orientals, and persons of Spanish origin constitute
about 7% of the art audience," but there is nothing whatsoever about
Jews, even their own percentage of that "art audience," let alone how
many art galleries they own, museums they direct, and articles they
generate about art value.[ix]

Why did it happen? What is the reason of Jewish success in the field of
Modern Art? It is not due to great achievements of Jewish artists: they
are quite modest, and despite the PR support of Jewish art collectors,
curators and critics, they are well within what could be expected for a
fifteen-million-strong wealthy community. Interaction of wealthy Jewish
collectors and philanthropists with Jewish critics active in the
Jewish-owned media provides us with a partial answer.

Still, the Jews were extremely ill equipped for their conquest of
Olympus. For many generations, Jews never entered churches and hardly
ever saw paintings. They were conditioned to reject image as part of
their rejection of idols. In the course of two thousand year long
selection process, visual gifs of Jews were not developed, as opposed to
abilities to learn, argue and convince honed to perfection in Talmudic
environment. Rejection of Christ ? this main fountain of creativity ? is
even deeper reason. There is no visual art or poetry outside of God, at
best, a godless person can imitate art. For this reason, Jews are, as a
rule, poor painters and sculptors. (Chagall and Modigliani embraced
Christ, and Chagall made the stained glass of Chartres). While their
mastery of word and ideology is very high (well above average of 100, at
130), their average visual ability is only 75, extremely low. One can
consider it a scientific proof of 'no art without Christ'. Indeed until
recently there were no important Jewish painters or sculptors. The
Jewish temple was supposedly built by Phoenicians and Greeks, and it had
a very few images. Even illumination of medieval Jewish manuscripts was
usually done by non-Jewish artists, who made very obvious errors trying
to copy Jewish letters.

Jewish success in the Art world is amazing. If the Olympic Sports
committee would consist of handicapped persons, and a fair share of
sports commentators would be lame, and even some winners of the games
would be lame, we would have reason to be astonished. But probably,
looking at it carefully we would find that the main Olympic sport is Run
in Bags, or chess.

Visually handicapped Jews created a similar anomaly ? that of non-visual
'conceptual' art. A piece of 'conceptual' art is describable and
explainable. It is a narration. Tracey Emin's 'Unmade bed' fully
describes the object, while another beauty, Alighiero Boetti's sculpture
'Yearly Lamp', a light bulb that illuminated itself only once every
twelve months, is fully described by this description. Preparation of
these items places no demand on artistic abilities. They can be done by
anybody. Such art is perfectly within Jewish abilities. Moreover, Jews
with their good ability to produce ideas and read iconography will
surely succeed in it. Thus, the Run in Bags, the kind of sport that
began as a new entry into Olympic games, eventually is promoted to the
position of an all-important one.

We can easily dismiss demonising talk of 'the Jews who destroy art in
order to break Aryan spirit'. Jews bend art to fit their abilities, in
order to succeed in this difficult (for them) occupation. Breaking (or
not) the Aryan spirit is quite irrelevant for them. While there are
wealthy Jews able to buy art and provide for an artist who makes what
they like, while there are witty Jews in the media that approve of the
art Jews like (one that is easy to tell about), they would create bias
in favour of the art they like and understand. But how did they get into
this position in the first place? How the lame runners of our example
have got their opening into the Olympic committee?

Despite their wealth and media domination, the Jews would not 'make it',
but for a few previous developments.

1. Photography and reproduction. Recently I visited an excellent photo
exhibition of Hagia Sophia mosaics, made to the highest standard. The
photographs are so good that one has to touch it in order to recognise
that these are not real mosaics. But for a strange reason, the
photocopies do not inspire. One can look at them all day long but the
soul is not stirred. And then, one comes across the real thing, and the
heart turns to God.

Photography is to painting as pornography to real women. Both create an
illusion of real thing, but leave a lingering emptiness. In the long
run, the 'real thing' suffers. Pornography undid many happy unions.
Reproduction of art conditioned us to view uninspiring beauty. It is
difficult to view a painting of Mona Lisa without instinctively
comparing it to its endless reproductions. In a way, the modern art was
a botched response to reproductions, for an artist needs to attract
attention of blasé viewers.

Photography was an important stepping stone to demise of art. Great
paintings were reproduced in albums, and caused no great uplifting in
the hearts. Purely materialistic vision of the age precluded even to
referring to the vast difference between original and copy. Painting
lost its uniqueness.

2. Museums. Removal of paintings and sculptures from the churches into
museums was fatal for the West. A painting lost its context, it was
de-contextualised and de-constructed. Paintings and sculptures of
Annunciation and Passion were given into the custody of the new
priesthood, the curators and critics. It undermined the living practice
of faith: despoiled of their precious art, empty churches did not
attract visitors.

De-contextualisation of art was done under cover of
not-too-sophisticated sophisms. "God needs no paintings, true faith
needs no adornment, art will be safe in museums" etc. As if the
organisers of mass confiscation wished to strengthen faith, as if they
wished to bring people to the church!... It reminds me the favourite
Jewish sentence so frequently used: 'It (whatever you are doing or
saying) is undermining the Palestinian cause', as if they wished to help
Palestinians.

In France, churches lost its riches in the beginning of the 20th
century, and since that time both faith and art (after a short splash)
went downhill. Need to 'protect art from thieves' was frequently used as
a pretext for undermining it. It was similar to locking princess away in
a Maiden Tower of so many legends. The Tower protected her, to be sure,
but it turned her into an old spinster.

The chef d'oevres of the human spirit were removed from the churches to
museum, - to jail. People go and visit the jailed dear friend for a
while, and it brings profit to jailers, while the churches brought no
profit; but eventually they forget the jailed man, and it is even more
profitable, for spirit interferes with profit.

3. De-sacralisation of art. It was achieved after removal of art into
museums. From this point of view, while Bilbao Guggenheim is quite
repulsive, its mother institution is even worse. New York Guggenheim
Museum of Modern Art carefully mixes sacral art and junk. Exposition is
done in a way saying: they are the same. Sacred images of Brazilian
Virgins are placed next to rude idols, or to erotica. Indeed, pictures
of Christ and His Mother are plentiful in the modern art. But as a rule,
they are aimed to profane their image. Made of faeces, or presented in
indecent poses, they are part of the war on art and Christ. A photograph
of crucifix in a container of urine, entitled Piss Christ was exhibited
in the Whitney Museum which is headed by a great friend of Ariel Sharon,
a member of Mega, Leonard Lauder. Recently I saw in Stockholm an image
of Christ presented as the poster for the week (or was it the month?) of
gay pride: a crucified black man was erotically embraced by a white
muscular Nordic man. He even placed the inside of his leg on the
crucified man's body.

If one wants to shock people one can follow the example of a small
Russian city that placed the icon of Christ on its coat of arms. All
Moscow-based American correspondents visited the dashing rebels and
asked them whether they are not afraid of Jews. Probably that is the
only 'sacrilege' that still has some shocking value. Alternatively, one
can envisage a model of the Wailing Wall with urinals in public toilet.

It is impossible to rule whether the Jewish participation (surely very
active) in the processes of de-uniquisation, de-contextualisation and
de-sacralisation of art was decisive. Consider a city with a big oil
company which supplied the citizens with oil. There was also a tiny
kerosene shop that provided a few diehards with the stuff in an
old-fashioned way. It was impossible even to compare the two companies.
But eventually the big company was streamlined, broken to pieces 'to
enliven competition' ? surely in the best interests of the customers, -
forced to tender some of its operations, and was undermined. The tiny
kerosene shop received the same status as the once great corporation,
and when the corporation's plant was burned down, it rose to unexpected
greatness. Was it achieved by the kerosene sellers, or did they enjoy
the windfall?

Now we come to a stumbling block of 'conspiracy'. Can one believe that
the Jews, ordinary Cohens and Levys, actually conspired to remove art
from churches, develop photography and place sacred images in
juxtaposition with profane things in order to kill art and the European
civilisation? Should we consider a possibility of Jewish conspiracy
against art as a part of the warfare against spirit?

In order to unravel this mystery we shall introduce a concept of a Group
Interest. Groups (classes and nations) have interests which do not
coincide with the sum of interests of its individual members. Moreover,
individual members are not always aware of this Group Interest. Let us
consider Mammon ? personification of capitalist Class Interest. A
capitalist may wish to sell drinking water, but Mammon wants to poison
all water in order to force everybody to buy drinking water. A
capitalist may build the mall, Mammon wants to destroy the world outside
the mall, for the outside world interferes with the only meaningful
occupation, shopping. While a separate capitalist can do a lot of
damage, his Class Interest, Mammon, is more dangerous, nay ruinous for
the world. Mammon will try to eliminate every distraction to shopping,
be it churches, art, forests, rivers, seaside, fresh air, mountains. An
individual capitalist probably is not aware that he follows his Class
Interest when he dumps chemical poison waste into a river.

For Mammonites, Art is a distraction from the most important occupation,
adoration of Mammon. Mammonite reviews of Art concentrate on price of
Art. Recent discussion of a possible fate of the Pink Madonna by Raphael
in the NY Times and in the Guardian was limited to the price tag and
ownership. A modern Russian writer Victor Pelevin described[x] an
exhibition of receipts, where the masterpieces are left in crates in the
storehouse, while the walls of the exhibition hall are adorned by an art
dealer-issued documents asserting that the painting was bought by the
private collector for, say, 15 million dollars. It is the most advanced
tendency in design, monetarist minimalism, says a character in the
novel. Indeed, judging by many art reviews, such an exhibition would do
nicely, as it keeps the most relevant items, price tag and ownership of
the piece of art.

For Mammonites, every art exhibition is a monetarist minimalist
exhibition, as they notice only the bottom line - price tag. Mother of a
Jewish American Princess is supposed to meet her potential son-in-law
wearing mink replete with price tag, says a cruel Jewish joke. In the
modern art, mink is removed, but the tag is preserved. Thus the
Capitalist Class Interest supports Conceptual Art; moreover, it turns
every kind of art into Conceptual art.

For Jews, their Group Interest lays in undermining visual art for they
can't compete in it. Even deeper group interest of Jews is to undermine
Christianity, their main enemy. We see this interest satisfied now by
relentless attack on Mel Gibson who dared to produce a film about
Christ. Not about Jesus ? a kind Jewish Rabbi, neither about whoring
Jeshu from jolly Nazareth ? but about God Who Died on the Cross. As
sacrality in Europe is unavoidably Christian, profanation of art is
certainly within Jewish Group Interests. It does not mean the Jews, or
even some Jews understand that they act in their own group interests.

However, they did it before, as well, for the Eastern Christianity
experienced a similar development twelve hundred years ago. The Jews
were prominent in the great tragedy of Byzantine art, the iconoclasm. In
the beautiful and spacious Church of Hagia Sophia, the arguably greatest
achievement of the Eastern Orthodox Christianity, lovingly restored in
20th century by Turkish masters, in vain one seeks mosaics of Justinian
and Theodora copied at Ravenna. One finds only relatively late mosaics
and frescoes. Everywhere, with a very few exclusions, the sacred images
of that fruitful period were destroyed, when the rejection of images
became the official doctrine of the Empire. They survived in far away
places: in St Catherine of Mt Sinai, in remote monasteries, to haunt us
with their sublime beauty and with feeling of irreparable loss. The
contemporary writers leave us no doubt: Jews (a powerful community in
these days as nowadays) were extremely active in promoting this concept.

However, this comparison brings some hope, for after two hundred years
of iconoclasm, people got tired of boring non-spiritual churches, and
brought the visual art back. Until now, the Church celebrates Sunday of
Orthodoxy, when the Art Came Back. We also can do it. The sacred images
should be returned to their rightful place, in the church. All of them,
the delightful Annunciation by van Eyck from Washington Museum, and
Trinity by Rublev in Moscow Museum of Old Russian Art, should be
re-contextualised. We should not be cruel to collectors: in my opinion,
Saatchi may keep all formaldehyde swine he likes.

And while at it, other cultural properties should be re-contextualised
as well. Let us return the mosaics of Pompeii to their place from the
boring museum of Naples, and the Greek marbles to Athens, let the
treasures of Mesopotamia go back to Iraq, and the statues of Hisham
Palace back to Jericho. Let us empty the Grand Louvre and fill small
French towns with art. It will repair the broken fabric of spirit. Art
objects can't be owned by private persons, they are our connection to
Divine. Restoration is possible: during last few years Russia restored
vast amount of churches, and precious icons were returned to them. In
Old Ladoga, an old Russian town, (70 miles from St Petersburg), restored
churches of 12th century shine again on the bank of Volchov River after
years of neglect. With gruesome complaints the Russian museums give up
church properties swallowed in 1920s. The West can do the same: there
will be thousands of visitors in the churches after their art pieces
will be restored to them, the fountain of faith will supply us with
endless creativity, and the Aberration will be over.

[i] FALLON, p. 335 This and following data is quoted by the great
compendium of Jewish activities, www.jewishtribalreview.org with much
gratitude.

[ii] BURNHAM, p. 25.

[iii] RUBIN- DURSKY, p. 289

[iv] LIPTON, p. 285

[v] GOODMAN, #2, p. 73

[vi] CHRISTOPHER, p. 121

[vii] KREFETZ, p. 153

[viii] GOODMAN, #2, p. 142

[ix] FOSTER/BLAU, 1989

[x] Pelevin, Babylon, Faber and Faber 1999.

(3) [shamireaders] Discussion on Communism

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