The exhibition won’t open until March 17, but the catalog was published in December. It shows works from the exhibition such as Polish artist Zbigniew Libera’s LEGO kit for building a concentration camp, a set of “designer” poison-gas canisters by American Tom Sachs and a cutesy, toylike Hitler cat by Frenchman Alain Sechas. Things got rolling when a Wall Street Journal reporter showed the catalog to Holocaust survivors and scholars, who were predictably outraged by art that they felt trivializes the horrors of the Nazi era. Detractors point to such over-the-top works as Israeli Army veteran Alan Schechner’s digitally concocted photograph of himself among Buchenwald inmates–holding a can of Diet Coke. The Jan. 18 issue of the New York Jewish weekly newspaper the Forward ran point-counterpoint pieces, one praising the exhibition for raising a number of meaningful questions. Sample: “Is [building a model death camp from LEGOs] different from ‘playing’ Nazis in the movies?” The rebuttal calls the show “excremental” and warns that if the museum doesn’t cancel, it will “reap… dire consequences.”
Norman Kleeblatt, the exhibition’s curator, points out that the Jewish Museum has a permanent installation concerning the Holocaust and often does shows that address it. “I’m not creating this particular exhibition for sensationalist reasons,” he says. “I’m doing it because of my response to works by a new generation of artists.” The museum has defensively inserted into its most recent press kits a list of worldwide Jewish intellectuals who attended meetings about the show and tacitly signed off on its legitimacy, and a fact-sheet citing differences between “Mirroring Evil” and the “Sensation” exhibition. (For example, “Sensation” had no profound theme, and came entirely from one self-promoting collector who deliberately courted scandal.)
The controversy will certainly help sell tickets, and critics are already decrying what they see as the museum’s opportunism. Director Joan Rosenbaum responds, “The way our museum ‘gets on the map,’ if that’s what you want to call it, is to do shows of Pissarro, Chagall and Soutine.” (Those recent exhibitions were uncontroversial, and very well-attended.) Rosenbaum adds that the current brouhaha is “a bit perplexing, especially when people are paying hundreds to see singing and dancing Nazis in ‘The Producers’ and no one condemns Broadway.” New Mayor Mike Bloomberg (an active patron of the arts, who resigned as vice-chairman of the museum’s board last month, ostensibly to avoid conflict of interest) has publicly stated that his administration will have no role in censoring art. People who don’t like the show should, he says, stay away from it, as he will. Kleeblatt, peeved that the flap is happening weeks in advance of anybody’s actually seeing the exhibition, says, “We’re doing this show with a great amount of context, so the issues in it are available for discussion.” OK then, until the opening, we’re still open-minded.
