The
Plot
Against
Art,
Part 2
Dr Lasha Darkmoon
September 20, 2009
I hate to tell
you this, but if you like modern art
there has to be something radically
wrong with you. To feel hostile towards
it is as natural as being repelled by
incest.
Modern art is out to corrupt you.
If it doesn’t do this, it will have
failed to achieve the primary purpose of
its elitist promoters. It will have
failed to undermine traditional values.
It will have failed to produce a
“culture of pessimism.” It will have
failed to destroy the sacral core of
life. It will have failed to poison your
mind and give you the sickness unto
death. It will have
failed to make you what Big Brother
finally managed to make Winston Smith in
Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four:
a mindless zombie.
The Wheelers and Dealers
That the Jews dominate the art world, as
they dominate the mass media and every
other area of influence, is the
best-kept secret of the twenty-first
century. One is not supposed to mention
this. It is
anti-Semitic to do so.
In 1989, an erudite academic volume
appeared called Sociology of the
Arts. In it the authors discuss who
is who in the art world. “Blacks,
Orientals, and persons of Spanish origin
constitute about 7 per cent of the art
audience,” the book informs us
helpfully. So what about the other 93
per cent?
What ethnic group owns most of the art
galleries? Who are the museum curators?
Who are the art historians? Who are the
art critics? Who publish the magazines
in which art is reviewed? Who determine
what is good art and what is rubbish?
Who are the dealers and big collectors?
Who run the auction houses? Who set up
the art competitions and raise the prize
money? Who appoint the judges? Who
are the judges?
Not a word. Total silence. Scary, isn’t
it?
As far back as 1930, it was noted by
French author Pierre Assouline:
“According to dealer Pierre Loeb, four
art dealers out of five are Jewish, as
are four out of five art collectors.
Wilhelm Unde added art critics to this
list.” In 1973, it was estimated that 80
per cent of the 2500 core “art market
personnel” — dealers, curators, gallery
owners, collectors, critics, consultants
and patrons of the arts — were Jewish.
In 1982, Gerald Krefetz (Jewish)
let the cat out of the bag even further.
“Today, Jews enjoy every phase of
the art world,” he admitted. “In some
circles, the wheelers and dealers are
referred to as the Jewish mafia.”
Writing of his experiences in New York
City, Jewish author Howard Jacobson
revealed that art critic Peter Schjedhal
had told him, “Just about every gallery
we go into is run by a Jew. Even the
women gallery owners whose wine we
absorb are Jewish.”
Riki R. Nelson,
Girl in a Box, Girl in Cherry Silk,
from the
Saatchi Gallery, London
In 2001, ARTnews listed the
world’s Top Ten Art Collectors. Eight of
them were Jews. Ponder these staggering
statistics: A
people who constitute 0.2% of the
world’s population make up 80% of the
world’s richest art collectors. Out of
every thousand people in the world,
roughly two are Jews. To be precise, one
in every 457 people are Jews. Yet go to
a conference at which 1000 of the
world’s wealthiest art collectors have
gathered and you will find, to your
amazement, that 800 of them are Jewish!
Phenomenal, isn’t it?
Nigerian-born
Chris Ofili's Holy Virgin Mary,
from the collection of
Charles Saatchi, an
influential Jewish art collector. The
painting is
described as "a carefully rendered
black Madonna decorated with a
resin-covered lump of elephant dung. The
figure is also surrounded by small
collaged images of female genitalia from
pornographic magazines." The painting
caused a public uproar and media frenzy
when exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum of
Art as part of the
Sensation
exhibition of Saatchi's collection
in 1999.
If you require
confirmation for these citations, see
here.
This huge cache of outré
information has been particularly useful
to me in researching the Jewish
influence on modern art.
The art world is so densely populated
with Jews that one way to get away from
the goyim, if you are Jewish, is to take
up art. That way, with any luck, you
won’t bump into a non-Jew for days! In
1996, Jewish art historian Eunice Lipton
confided somewhat tactlessly that the
only reason she became an art historian
was that she wanted to hang out
exclusively with Jews. “I wanted to be
where Jews were — that is, I wanted a
profession that would allow me to
acknowledge my Jewishness through the
company I kept.”
On the face of it, she noted, art
history would seem to be a gentile
profession, if only because the study of
Christian art was its hub and center.
And yet, she says, “the field was filled
with Jews. One might even say it was
shaped by them.”
She was doubtless thinking of the great
historian of Renaissance art, Bernard
Berenson, whose influence has been
seminal. Berenson
once described himself as “a typical
Talmud Jew” who longed to drop “the mask
of the goyim” — hardly, one is tempted
to think, a fit interpreter of Christian
art to the hated gentiles! Though he had
converted to Christianity in 1885, here
we see him, almost sixty years later in
1944, writing an
“Open Letter to the Jews” in which he
warns them about “envious Christians”
who would persecute them “even if you
were innocent as the angels.” To my
mind, this sounds more Talmudic than
Christian.
With the rise of German fascism, Jewish
art historians began to flee Nazi
Germany, along with those Marxist
revolutionaries known as the Frankfurt
School. Most of these Jews ended up in
America. At New York University alone,
the following Jewish art historians were
to take up residence: Richard
Ettinghaven, Walter Friedlander, Karl
Lehman, Alfred Salmony, Guido
Schoenberger, Martin Weinberger.
Art historian Lipton probably also has
in mind — when she says she wanted to
live in a predominantly Jewish
atmosphere — the two most illustrious
art critics of the twentieth century,
Harold Rosenberg and Clement Greenberg.
Like Berenson, Greenberg appears to have
had a distinctly Talmudic cast of mind.
Convinced of Jewish superiority, he once
remarked, “The European Jew represents a
higher type of human being than any
other yet achieved.”
Both these influential critics,
Rosenberg and Greenberg, were members of
the Frankfurt School and helped to
reshape the aesthetic perceptions of the
gentile masses.
Bending Art to Jewish Abilities
All art henceforth was to be “Jewish”.
It would break free from its Christian
roots. Whatever Jewish artists were good
at, that would be the art of the future.
If Jews were no good at drawing, good
drawing would no longer be necessary.
Representational art was out, abstract
and conceptual art was in. Actual
unmade beds, not pictures
of them, now became works of art. Marcel
Duchamp's famous urinals
— bought in a store and transported to
an art gallery where they were magically
transformed into
works of art. Cans stuffed with the
artist’s own excrement.
Photos of crucifixes stuck in glasses of
the
artist’s own urine.
Marcel Duchamp's
Fountain,
photographed in 1917 by
Alfred Steiglitz,
an early 20th-century Jewish
photographer and promoter of modern art.
“It does not take much stretching of the
imagination,”
gushes Calvin Tomkins, art critic of
the New Yorker, “to see in the
urinal’s gently flowing curves the
veiled head of a classic Renaissance
Madonna or a seated Buddha.” In 2004,
this inspired pissoire was voted Most
Influential Work of the 20th century by
500 “art experts” — sorry,
“piss-artists.”
“Preparation of these items places no
demand on artistic abilities. They can
be done by anybody,” Israel Shamir
points out, adding somewhat cuttingly,
“Such art is perfectly
within Jewish capabilities.”
In order to succeed in this difficult
profession, the visually challenged Jews
had to “bend art to fit their
abilities.” It is as if, unable to excel
at athletic prowess, the Jews had
somehow managed to gain control over the
Olympic Games and decreed that, from now
on, sprinting and marathon running were
no longer important. What really
mattered was winning the sack race
or the Spitting Competition —
accomplishments, possibly, which Jews
were particularly good at!
“The Jews were extremely ill equipped
for their conquest of Olympus,” Shamir
instructs us. “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 short, the
Jews were visually handicapped. Trained
in Talmudic dialectics, they were
marvelous with words. They had a verbal
IQ of 130. Their IQ for patterns and
pictures, however, was dismally low:
only 75.
The Jews of course don’t wish to
acknowledge this. To suggest that they
tend to make lousy artists is
anti-Semitic. If Jews didn’t make more
of a splash as artists in past ages, it
is argued, it was because they were
“held back” by their Christian
oppressors. Unfortunately for the Jews,
the great Berenson will have none of
this argument. “The
Jews have displayed little talent for
the visual,” he states tersely, “and
almost none for the figure arts.”
How, then, you might wish to know, are
there so many Jewish artists around
nowadays? To what can we attribute this
fantastic efflorescence of sudden Jewish
pictorial genius? The answer, we are
told, lies in
Jewish networking and hustling:
Jewish predominance in the mass media,
Jewish economic dominance of the art
world, Jewish power, Jewish money.”
How Anyone Can Be Famous
Andy Warhol once said that everyone in
the future will be “world-famous for
fifteen minutes.” What he failed to
point out was that almost anyone,
including the village idiot, can be made
into a celebrity with the help of public
relations. All it takes is constant
attention in the mass media.
Charles Saatchi,
advertising mogul and art collector
extraordinaire, spells it out: “An
unknown artist’s big glass vitrine
holding a rotten cow’s head covered by
maggots and swarms of buzzing flies may
be pretty unsalable. Until the artist
becomes a star. Then he can sell
anything he touches” (my emphasis).
Interior of
Everyone I have ever Slept With,
1963–1995, an iconic work by Tracey
Emin, owned by Charles Saatchi until
being destroyed in a fire.
Damien
Hirst, A Thousand Years (1990).
Richard Lacayo of
Time Magazine:
“A
Thousand Years is
a large glass box in which real maggots
hatch into flies that appear to feed on
blood from a severed cow’s head.”
Charles Saatchi
and Hirst had a "symbiotic
relationship" as collector and
artist from about 1992–2003.
How does one become a star? Who gives
the Emperor his new clothes and helps to
suggest he is remarkably well dressed?
An unmade bed is transformed into a
consummate work of art once it is bought
by Charles Saatchi and placed in a
prestigious art gallery. The artist
acquires a mystique created out of the
power of suggestion. You must be
a genius if everyone is raving about you
and your unmade bed. Mass hypnosis does
the trick. Advertising and persistent
persuasion work wonders. See
here and
here and
here.
Let me ask you a question. If someone
tried to sell you his excrement for $10,
would you buy it? Probably not. Well,
consider this: on May 23, 2007, a can
labeled
Artist’s Shit, purportedly
containing the excrement of artist Piero
Manzoni, was sold at Sotheby’s for
€124,000
(US$ 180,000).
How is it done? Is a can of shit worth
its weight in gold? It obviously is — if
people are fighting to buy it.
A larger question: If you can con people
into buying shit, can you also con them
into evil wars in the Middle East and
mass cultural suicide in their own
homelands? Nothing easier. It’s being
done right now.
Talent helps, but is it essential?
You will be surprised to learn that some
Jewish artists, despite Berenson’s
sweeping dismissal of their visual
abilities, are actually quite good at
painting. For example, Modigliani and
Chagall. Shamir attributes some of their
excellence, however, to the influence of
Christianity. These two Jewish artists
became Christians. This helped, Shamir
thinks, to make them good painters. At
least they had something to say now.
Life had taken on a new meaning. They
weren’t just scratching their
existential sores and whining “God is
dead!”
On the other hand, there were other
artists who remained firmly within the
Jewish camp and managed to distinguish
themselves: notably, Pissarro
(impressionist), Soutine
(expressionist), Max Ernst (surrealist),
and Tamara de Lempicka (art deco). To
succeed as an artist in the new milieu,
it helped if you were Jewish. Thus both
Frida Kahlo and Gustav Klimt arguably
owed their initial success to the fact
that everyone thought they were Jewish.
They were not, but somehow managed to
give that impression.
The important thing to remember in all
this is that artistic talent had become,
strictly speaking, non-essential. It
helped, but promotion by a good
publicist helped more. The artist had to
be a showman rather than a skilled
craftsman. Neither
Tracey Emin (patchwork
quilt) nor
Damien Hirst (shark
preserved in formaldehyde) found it
necessary to create their own works of
art. Cheap manual assistants were often
hired to do this for them. The vital
thing in their art was the original
concept. The end product was of
secondary importance.
Tell Me Something
Beautiful
is a patchwork quilt stitched up
entirely by eight-year-olds from
Ecclesbourne primary school, London,
with Emin in the classroom offering
advice. When the school wanted to sell
the quilt for £35.000 ($60,000) to an
art dealer, Emin threw a fit and
threatened legal action, demanding the
quilt be “returned” to her at once.
The successful contemporary artist needs
to be a person devoid of moral scruples.
Confidence trickster, hustler,
prostitute, pimp, he needs to mix with
the right crowd and know whom to
cultivate. “The artist who would be
known,” wrote the great folklorist
Joseph Campbell, “has to go to cocktail
parties to win commissions, and those
who win them are not in their studios
but at parties, meeting the right people
and appearing in the right places.”
Campbell was later accused of
anti-Semitism, but Jewish artist Julian
Schnabel backs up Campbell’s claim.
“Much time is spent nurturing liaisons
with creatures of the art world,” he
notes gloomily. “There is no time for
friendship. Later, there is no capacity
for it.”
How does a really talented artist
succeed in such a rat race?
Painter Helen Frankenthaler had to sleep
with art critic Clement Greenberg, but
it was worth it: Greenberg gave her good
reviews. Willem de Kooning let his wife
Elaine bed down with art critic Harold
Rosenberg, but it was worth it:
Rosenberg gave de Kooning good reviews.
Jackson Pollock had to pleasure
nymphomaniac Peggy Guggenheim, but it
was worth it: her patronage helped to
get Pollock good reviews. After all, her
daddy owned the Guggenheim Museum.
None of these artists slept around for
love. They did it for money. Jackson
Pollock famously said of Peggy
Guggenheim, his plutocratic patroness:
“To fuck her, you’d have to put a towel
over her head. And she
did want fucking.”
“Incestuous collusion, mutual
back-scratching, under the table
wheeling and dealing, nepotism and
clique allegiance are intrinsic
principles of the modern art world,” art
expert
Sophy Burnham concludes ruefully.
That’s how it is. C’est la vie!
It’s so heartbreaking you have to laugh.
If you wish to succeed as a modern
artist, be prepared to lie and cheat, to
be a confidence trickster and sexual
exhibitionist, to flatter your Jewish
patrons and churn out Holocaust
paintings to please them, to sing the
praises of Israel and vilify the
Palestinians, to knock Islam and the
Qur’an and show contempt for
Christianity. Unless you are Jewish, you
must lose all allegiance to your people,
your religion, or your traditional
culture.
Be prepared to prostitute yourself if
you’re a woman or pimp your wife if
you’re a man. Be prepared to do a
Piss Christ like Andres Serrano or a
pornographic Holy Virgin Mary
like Chris Ofili. Be prepared, like
Grayson Perry, to dress up as a woman
and produce sexually perverted pots. Be
prepared to pull a paper scroll out of
your vagina like
Carolee Schneemann. Be
prepared, like
Vito Acconci, to titillate
a jaded public by masturbating for them
in a prestigious art gallery — and
calling it ‘art’.
Leonardo must be turning in his grave.
Let art critic Clement Greenberg have
the last word: “I’ve decided the kind of
people attracted to art are often
psychopaths. You can quote me on that.”
He should know. |