A brave new Holocaust exhibit

With a mix of excitement and trepidation, New York’s Museum of Jewish Heritage announced this week that it is planning to stage an exhibition devoted to the writer Irène Némirovsky in the fall.

The exhibition, the first museum show ever devoted to the recently rediscovered French author, is in many regards a coup for the 10-year-old institution. It is also, by the museum’s own admission, something of a risk.

In certain respects, Némirovsky, who perished at Auschwitz in 1942, is a natural subject for the museum that calls itself “A Living Memorial to the Holocaust.” That one of the author’s final pieces of writing, the unfinished manuscript discovered more than 50 years after her death and published as “Suite Française” in 2004, has become an international sensation only enhances her appeal. And yet, choosing Némirovsky — a convert to Catholicism who published in right-wing journals and whose early work contains what can only be seen as deeply unsympathetic portrayals of Jews — is a departure. It is also, some observers of the museum world say, a daring and historic move.

“Holocaust museums are so often concerned with communicating a clear and unambiguous message,” said Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, professor of performance studies at New York University and an authority on contemporary Jewish museums. “By taking up the subject of Némirovsky, the Museum of Jewish Heritage is showing a willingness to lift things beyond the realm of black and white. The show may well be controversial, but it will open up a new kind of conversation.”

Read the rest of that story from The Forward here.

For sale: 'Sketch that roiled the Muslim world'

AARHUS, Denmark -- Kurt Westergaard is in hiding from Islamic militants who want him dead. Now, the Danish cartoonist says he's ready to part with the source of his travails, a small ink sketch of the Prophet Muhammad with a bomb in his turban.

But first there is the ticklish question of price.

"I would like to think that it has some value," says Mr. Westergaard, the 72-year-old creator of one of the world's most famous cartoons and one that inflamed Muslims world-wide. "It is a symbol of democracy and freedom of expression. I think I should have a little money for this," he says.

The drawing is locked in a bank vault while the cartoonist shuttles between temporary havens the Danish secret police have found for him around this blustery port city. His is by far the best known of 12 Muhammad-related cartoons published in September 2005 by Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten. But how do you fix the value of something that auction houses won't touch, that museums won't hang on their walls and that still inspires murderous passions?

Two weeks ago, Danish authorities said they had foiled a plot to kill Mr. Westergaard in his home. Seventeen Danish newspapers, outraged and eager to show solidarity, reprinted his drawing. Muslims again took to the streets. Iran and others demanded an apology. "I always had a feeling this cartoon crisis would not end," says Mr. Westergaard. "Now I know."

Yet the new round of trouble may only increase the cartoon's worth eventually. "Things gain value from public interest and history," notes Sebastian Lerche, a director of Denmark's biggest auction house, Bruun Rasmussen. He is quick to add he has no interest in testing the market: "We see no point in offending millions of people," he says.

Some Muslims here want the bomb-in-a-turban drawing destroyed. Salah Suleiman, an activist in a mosque that helped whip up the fury over it in early 2006, delights in the artist's troubles and says no amount of money can save him from God's wrath: "He is living like a rat.... He is living in hell already."

This story from today's Wall Street Journal is headlined "Price of Notoriety," and doesn't Westergaard know it. Coincidentally, The Jewish Journal had an op-ed today from the culture editor of Westergaard's paper.

Sadly, the plot to kill Westergaard is not an isolated story, but part of a broader trend that risks undermining free speech in Europe and around the world. Consider the following recent events: In Oslo, a gallery has censored three small watercolor paintings showing the head of the prophet Muhammad on a dog's body, by the Swedish artist Lars Vilks, who has been under police protection since the fall of 2007. In Holland, the municipal museum in The Hague recently refused to show photos of gay men wearing the masks of the prophet Muhammad and his son Ali by the Iranian-born artist Sooreh Hera; Hera has received several death threats and is in hiding. In Belarus, an editor has been sentenced to three years in a forced labor camp after republishing some of Jyllands-Posten's Muhammad cartoons. In Egypt, bloggers are in jail after having "insulted Islam." In Afghanistan, 23-year-old Sayed Perwiz Kambakhsh has been sentenced to death because he distributed "blasphemous" material about the mistreatment of women in Islam. And in India, Bengal writer Taslima Nasreen is in a safe house after having been threatened by people who don't like her books.

Every one of the above cases speaks to the same problem: a global battle for the right to free speech. The cases are different, and you can't compare the legal systems in Egypt and Norway, but the justifications for censorship and self-censorship are similar in different parts of the world: Religious feelings and taboos need to be treated with a kind of sensibility and respect that other feelings and ideas cannot command.

This position boils down to a simple rule: If you respect my taboo, I'll respect yours. That was the rule of the game during the Cold War until people like Vaclav Havel, Lech Walesa, Andrei Sakharov and other dissenting voices behind the Iron Curtain insisted on another rule: It is not cultures, religions or political systems that enjoy rights. Human beings enjoy rights, and certain principles like the ones embedded in the U.N. Declaration of Human Rights are universal.

Unfortunately, misplaced sensitivity is being used by tyrants and fanatics to justify murder and silence criticism.

'Pornographic' Jesus sculpture protested at London Shabbat service

The strangest story about Jesus and art since the chocolate messiah is this one involving a Jewish art collector in London and a statue she owns "depicting Jesus with a phallus."

An advocacy group called Christian Voice has been up in arms over the "blasphemous" and "pornographic" sculpture, and has added a clock to the top of its home page counting:

Time which billionaire Jewish art collector (and friend of the Chief Rabbi) Anita Zabludowicz has had to destroy her blasphemous, pornographic statue of Jesus Christ with a phallus attached, since getting it back from the Baltic Centre in Gateshead at 6.00pm on Saturday 20th January 2008.

Christian Voice has written letters to the chief rabbi and distributed fliers outside the synagogue as people should up for minchah last Shabbat. Christian Voice's leader explained:

“Just as the sin of Achan in taking a valuable but accursed thing from Jericho brought judgment on the whole community of Israel, so his [Mr Zabludowicz’s] actions and those of his wife, in clinging on to this valuable but accursed statue, is bringing the slur of blasphemy against the whole Jewish community.

“The rest of the council too are complicit in his and Anita’s continuing scorn for the One whom Christians hold most holy of all, and that includes the Chief Rabbi, who appears to have told them to ‘Carry on blaspheming’.”

(Hat tip: Bintel Blog)

The art of intuition

Last month, I sat down for a Q&A with Jonah Lehrer, who's made quite a splash -- if an expert on the intersection of art and neuroscience can do so -- with his first book, "Proust Was a Neuroscientist." The book was well-reviewed, and the LA Times just listed it one of the 25 best non-fiction books of the year. Here's the first chapter.

To me, what makes Lehrer's thesis so profound is it's simplicity: We expect artists to explain in words and pictures human experiences long before science has caught up. But his understanding of the two, and his ability to weave them together, makes for a good read, even if a review in The Jewish Journal thought it was boringly obvious.

Here's the beginning of my interview:

Jewish Journal: In your book, you are particular to refer to these works of art as intuitions, not predictions. Why?

Jonah Lehrer: [Art] is very different from science, which does try to predict the results of experiments -- you generate hypotheses, you have control variables. These artists were very rigorous in their own sense. They were very sensitive observers of experience, but they weren't trying to predict. They were trying to look at their experience, and introspect on it, and intuit on that. We tend to disregard experience and say, "Oh, that is just wishy-washy stuff." These artists demonstrate that you can learn important things just by paying attention.


JJ: Toward the end of the book, you write, 'You don't even exist.'

JL: That is one of these surreal ideas of neuroscience, which is that there is no cell that represents you, there is no discreet circuit from which you emerge. You are just a distributed parallel processor. You've got all these neurons doing their thing and you emerge somehow simultaneously from this helter-skelter of activity.

At the same time, it's not very meaningful to say that is all we are. Clearly we are self-conscious creatures. We feel like so much more, and there is a mystery there which science won't be able to solve: How the water of the brain becomes the wine of the mind.... That is the question that art is uniquely able to interrogate and try to solve.

It's not about ethics, it's business

Everyone's favorite Jewish ice cream entrepreneurs, Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield -- yes, that Ben and Jerry -- are currently locked up in a bitter battle with soured franchisees.

No religion angle here, except the shirt shopowner Alan Sherman is wearing in Newsweek's photo (right). But this reminds me of a story I wrote last year about accusations that Thomas Kinkade, the self-styled "Painter of Light," had used his Christian faith to defraud investors.

Controversy has surrounded Kinkade for the past four years, after stock of the company he took public (Media Arts Group) plummeted from a high of $23 a share to less than $3. In 2004, he bought the company back at about $4 a share. Kinkade is now the sole owner.

His paintings are known for their vibrant colors and idyllic settings, their country cottages, chilly creeks, and glowing clouds. "The critics may not endorse me," the artist told CT in 2000. "But I own the hearts of the people."

Individual investors run some 500 Kinkade galleries worldwide, with the overwhelming majority in the United States. Signature Galleries, which sell only Kinkade art, cost upwards of $50,000 to open. Media Arts Group required that new owners attend a training conference called "Thomas Kinkade University." Yatooma said this is where his clients drank "the Kinkade Kool-Aid."

"Thomas Kinkade University had a revival-like atmosphere. They would close in prayer and join together in worship. Everybody would leave with their head spinning—now sign the dotted line," Yatooma said. "They thought they were going to make money by sharing the light."

Other investors told me that was nonsense, "comical" even, because they opened Kinkade galleries to make money, not spread the gospel. Which reminds me of that Mafioso axiom: It's not personal, it's business.

Two side notes:

According to my friends at Reel Intelligence, Kinkade's inspirations may soon be, ehem, gracing, the big screen. Or, because the movie is "Thomas Kinkade's Home for Christmas" and a release date has yet to be set, maybe they won't.

Anyway, my favorite flavor is far and away Half Baked.

Science imitating art

I was flipping through the new Wired yesterday and I came across a Q&A with Jonah Lehrer. The son of former Los Angeles ADL chief David Lehrer, Jonah is an editor at large for Seed and in his new book, "Proust was a Neuroscientist," he argues that artists predict the scientific future.

Wired: Do you really think that we'll find answers to science's Big Questions in the arts?

Lehrer: Virginia Woolf isn't going to help you finish your lab experiment. What she will do is help you ask your questions better. Proust focused on problems that neuroscience itself didn't grapple with until relatively recently — questions of memory that couldn't be crammed into Pavlovian reinforcement: Why are memories so unreliable? Why do they change so often? Why do we remember only certain aspects of the past?

Wired: Has the separation of the disciplines held them back?

Lehrer: It has affected both cultures adversely. You read the diary of Woolf and the letters of Cézanne and realize they thought they were discovering something true -- in the same real way that science is true -- but we don't think of artists that way anymore. The separation has also led science to neglect this other side of the mind. It's important to acknowledge that when you discuss the brain only in terms of proteins and enzymes, you're missing something.

Art, obviously, also has a lot to say about God, religion, faith, et al. I'm not really talking about Da Vinci's "Last Supper" or Michaelangelo's "David" but the themes of art and literature that reveal how we see our place in creation and define our relationship with the divine. "The Chronicles of Narnia" and "The Divine Comedy" are easy examples. Anybody have others?

Sweet Jesus

A New York artist has sculpted a life-size Jesus with his arms spread wide and his feet together, in the position of one being crucified. It's made of chocolate and Christ is NAKED -- endowment and all. (Click here to see.)

The artist's creation, which will be on display in New York for the week beginning Palm Sunday, is the latest culture-war issue to draw the ire of Catholic firebrand Bill Donohue. The website for his Catholic League has two rants against the artist's intentions. Here's part of the first:

As I’ve said many times before, Lent is the season for non-believers to sow seeds of doubt about Jesus. What’s scheduled to go on at the Roger Smith Hotel, however, is of a different genre: this is hate speech. And choosing Holy Week—the display opens on Palm Sunday and ends on Holy Saturday—makes it a direct in-your-face assault on Christians.

All those involved are lucky that angry Christians don’t react the way extremist Muslims do when they’re offended—otherwise they may have more than their heads cut off. James Knowles, President and CEO of the Roger Smith Hotel (interestingly, he also calls himself Artist-in-Residence), should be especially grateful. And if he tries to spin this as reverential, then he should substitute Muhammad for Jesus and display him during Ramadan.

Thanks to the Dallas Morning News religion blog for pointing this out.

* Updated: The nude chocolate Jesus exhibition has been cancelled. Here was David Kuo's take on the art show planned for Holy Week.