by Jerome du Bois
From LittleGreenFootballs yesterday:
The Israeli ambassador to Sweden [Zvi Mazel]completely lost it at the opening of a new exhibition at Stockholm’s Museum of National Antiquities, and smashed an exhibit glorifying the Islamic Jihad mass murderer who blew up the Maxim restaurant: Ambassador wrecks suicide bomber exhibit in Sweden.[actually an update of original story. Also, LGF now has links to video that show he didn't really lose his temper, but calmly dismantled the piece.]
Located in the museum’s courtyard, “Snow White and the Madness of Truth” depicted a smiling Hanadi Jaradat, the Maxim restaurant suicide bomber who killed 21 patrons and staff as well as herself on October 4. Her photograph was placed on a little boat floating in a basin filled with water dyed red.
From today's New York Times:
"When I saw it, I became a bit emotional," Mr. Mazel said in a telephone interview from Stockholm. "There was the terrorist, wearing her perfect makeup and floating on the blood of my people."
You can see a photo there on the page, and above the little boat the two bozos -- Gunilla Skold Feiler and her husband Dror -- that made the thing. Interestingly, Mrs. Feiler couldn't seem to keep her homicide/suicide bombers straight:
Mrs. Feiler told Expressen, a Swedish newspaper, that the work was not intended as "a glorification of the suicide bomber." Instead, she said, "I wanted to show how incomprehensible it is that a mother of two — who is a lawyer no less — can do such a thing," apparently conflating the Haifa bomber with an attack carried out on Wednesday by another Palestinian woman.
Who can blame her for her confusion? The murderers are busy these days.
The Feilers are typical of many contemporary artists who still think they are somehow special, that what they have to say is important and original, and that the appellation artist still carries some automatic ineffable cachet. So they think they get to operate with impunity outside the bounds of civilized society, spitting (and worse) on people, and getting all indignant when you call them on it. [Sounds like recent events on this blog.] And, since most people go along, and their teachers have never taught them anything, we now endure the dictatorship of artistic mediocrity, where the only tool they can deploy anymore -- since they lack talent, imagination, and sensitivity -- is shock. That adolescent tactic is almost a hundred years old, and it now carries the further insult -- beyond merely irritating the complacent bourgeosie -- of artists sitting contentedly in gore and offal, happily splashing like spoiled babies in the blood of the innocent.
And everybody's smiling.
It's no accident that it took someone completely outside the Swedish artistic sphere to raise a righteous ruckus about this outrage. And, after what we witnessed (and didn't witness) at SMoCA last week, I wonder if anyone there that night, seeing the Feilers' piece, would have so much as lifted a stenciled eyebrow.
[Update: For a completely different, and mind-boggling, take on this incident, go check out this post at Franklin Einspruch's artblog.net, which opens with these sentences:
It is my wish [!] that the problems in the Middle East end in peace, not fire and death. I also expect political artists to know what they're talking about. It therefore discourages me to hear today that an Israeli diplomat misinterpreted a bad piece of art by clueless artists in Stockholm and went apeshit over it.
Misinterpreted. It's not the Stockholm artists who are clueless, it's those who think they are. The Feilers know exactly what they're doing.]