or, perhaps a less incendiary and more accurate title would be: is being without the unrepatriated art one made while at auschwitz really anything like the conditions in the camp?
question: maybe art does matter?
backstory: dina babbitt (née gottliebova) was a jewish czech artist who spent two years at auschwitz. she had her mother's and her lives spared by painting portraits of gypsy camp prisoners for the nazi physician josef mengele (a.k.a. "the angel of death") "to capture their skin tones better" so as to "prove their genetic inferiority." babbit wants those paintings, which have been in the possession of and on display in the holocaust museum at auschwitz-birkenau since 1973, returned to her (she now lives in california).
interesting questions (viz. the possibly exaggerated value of art, artist's rights, cultural institutions, and their alleged curatorial responsibilities to cultural memory). and, while comparing the disempowerment of losing one's art to that of the conditions at auschwitz seems unnecessarily and inappropriately hyperbolic to me, i'm obviously in no position to judge the feelings of an auschwitz survivor. the problematic nature of the art also adds an interesting wrinkle, though i'll reserve my judgement on that too.
8/16/08
ONE MAN'S STRUGGLE (VALIANT EFFORT) AGAINST 4 LITRES (> 1 GALLON) OF (2%) MILK
8/14/08
THIS IS HOW WE PERIODISE, FROM '93 UNTIL...
1.
a week ago, the new york timescompared zhang yimou to leni riefenstahl. that was horrific. the horror ensued later in the week, when it came out that the spanish basketball team did this, which, according to toronto raptors point guard josé calderón, the team "thought . . . was something appropriate and that it would always be interpreted as somewhat loving." american point guard jason kidd's reaction to the short life of the controversy, the paucity of outrage at the ad, and the lack of institutional censure: "We would've been already thrown out of the Olympics [if we african-american players had done that]." but just as the spanish basketball team's dirty business has been swept under the rug, no one is talking about china's human rights record, or darfur, or freedom of speech, or anything else now that the games have started.
and on some level, i'm relieved. i was getting pretty fucking sick of all of the anti-chinese sentiment flying about from the left and the right leading up to the olympics. human rights violations? of course we should be talking about that. darfur? absolutely. but, taking the aforementioned times article comparing zhang to riefenstahl as representative of the anti-chinese sentiment in the mainstream media in the previous months, the question has nothing to do with human rights or genocide (or, as it were, non-genocidal mass killings); it was all moral handwringing directed at china for not having an american-style, western democracy, where people are "free" to "speak." yr fucking democracy others me, right?
as for zhang yimou, he hasn't "changed, man." he hasn't sold out. he was always a shill. an enormously talented and culturally significant shill, but a shill nonetheless. when he made jú dòu and raise the red lantern, he was shilling for western art house cinema audiences, and now, under more favourable political conditions at home, he shills for the republic. to call him a shill now and not before is, again, to assume the inevitability and intrinsic moral superiority (über Alles in der Welt?)* of american-style, western democracy.
* note: my tossed-off holocaust reference is no worse and no more childish than the new york times', which makes the wholly inappropriate comparison between the complicity of a billion citizens supporting, but living completely under, an economic superpower in transition and the completely different historical circumstances of hitler's willing executioners.**
** note to note: just so there are no misunderstandings, the reference to daniel goldhagen's book hitler's willing executioners was a joke (note the link to the wikipedia article that ends with raul hilberg calling goldhagen "totally wrong about everything. totally wrong. exceptionally wrong"). i would never ever characterise the german people as "hitler's willing executioners" with a straight face, not because the nation's complicity is not a very important question to ask, but because goldhagen's thesis about the nation's "eliminationist anti-semitism" is far too easy an answer, posed in far too flippant a manner. my borrowing of goldhagen's phrase was to show how absolutely inappropriate i found the times' comparison of zhang with riefenstahl, and that the current chinese regime cannot be compared to the third reich anymore than the population of germany in the 30s and 40s can be fairly called "hitler's willing executioners."
2.
speaking of american-style democracy (following from what i wrote before the two qualifiers), this was in pitchfork today:
it's instructive to realize that what we figuratively consider "the sixties" is roughly the period from 1965 to 1973, when the United States was embroiled in the Vietnam War and undergoing the paroxysmal changes that made it into a true democracy for the first time in its history.
this "true democracy for the first time" silliness follows an interesting question raised in P4k about periodising music last week (the same day as the opening ceremonies and the times article on zhang). the byline to tom ewing's column: "The history of pop music might be a better, and more fitting, story if it somehow left out the music criticism." which is to say, let's talk about how people listen to music and what it means to them, not list the records you think are the best, ranked and filed according to genre, format, and year.
a couple of months ago, i wrote about how to periodise the 60s and the early 90s. the latter, i tend to see through a confluence of significant cultural works and the lived subcultural production and reception of them. which is to say that, in a lot of ways, i haven't gotten past the classic album. but then i also haven't gotten past the historically pregnant moment either; i believe in a history that follows from the event. ewing argues for more of a classic 1980s-style macro social history, which i've always considered to be a thoughtless majoritarianism that narrates what we can see happen, as opposed to how it might have come to be. but it was certainly a welcome breath of fresh air compared to everything that goes on at pitchfork.
3.
and, to switch gears to another example of someone who has no understanding of the relationship between culture and history, this was particularly bad. to the kid who wrote that article, you can't be an après moi la merde-ist; you're already the "merde" we refer to when we say après moi la merde.
i'm joking, of course. we are all the pile of debris before him that grows skyward. but — holy sh1t, culture is O-VER!!!111!!1 it's NEVER been like this before — mercilessly ironic, the historical naïveté of the guy decrying "hipster culture" for being ahistorical, no?
There are those who will suggest, with varying degrees of self-awareness and (intentional) hilarity, that an entire generation of media-bombarded, entertainment- and style-obsessed young people is essentially making the same mistake as the Baby Boomers: assuming that the stuff we buy can define us. What people who earnestly hate on blog-hopping 20-somethings don't get . . . is that — unlike our parents' generation — even if we thought we could be defined by things we acquire, we still wouldn't actually pay for them. Sean Fanning is our Bill Gates. We'll devour your content, but good luck coming up with a business model.
hell, as P4k tells us, even hipsterrunoff.com knows that it's happened before (though, of course, i'm a little more on the side of theodor adorno, who saw this cultural amnesia and ahistoricism as an inescapable and constitutive fact of industrial capitalism, and for whom there is no first, second, or last instance of it, only an uninterrupted force with no likely end short of the end of capitalism itself).
8/12/08
CHINESE PEOPLE ENTHUSIASTICALLY VIDEOTAPING KOBE BRYANT EATING FRENCH FRIES
"I wait for him for a long time, and he eat so much and long long..."
8/11/08
CREATIVE PEOPLE > HOMELESS PEOPLE
from the press release of the documentary alien boy:
The officers beat him, kicked him, broke 17 ribs and his shoulder. They used a Taser on him repeatedly. He screamed for mercy.
The officers thought James was a drug dealer, a homeless person, a non-person, a ghost. They were wrong. James was a poet, a musician, he had a family which loved him, friends, neighbors, dreams and hopes. He was an artist; a small, shy, gentle person.
so the implication is that artists, poets, musicians, people with families and loved ones are more valuable people than drug dealers and the homeless? that it wouldn't have been so bad if it were a homeless man that the cops killed? yr subjectivity kills me.
8/03/08
RIGHTS MUST BE DEFENDED
in fucking moron news, B.C. man files human-rights complaint over 'Jesus sucks' banner. the moron in question, dean skoreyko, alleges that "he wanted to make the point that the human-rights system applies double standards, favouring only minority interests." this was in reaction to an episode of showtime's kenny vs. spenny program, in which kenny, in a contest against spenny to "see who could offend the most people," flew a plane pulling a "jesus sucks" banner over toronto. skoreyko claimed in his complaint that "my Christian beliefs and upbringing were publicly ridiculed." the complaint was filed under religious discrimination. fucking white people, think human rights is a game. should have their hands cut off.
on a completely unrelated note and for no good reason,
