6.18.2007
Antisemitism and anti-Americanism at the Venice Biennale
[Posted 10:44 AM by James Panero]
Now that the weblog is functioning again, I wanted to share with everyone some images of the dark side of the Venice Biennale. Now, you certainly wouldn’t expect to see this after having read the encomia from Michael Kimmelman and Randy Kennedy and Carol Vogel in The New York Times, or David Cohen in The New York Sun for that matter (did we see the same show?).
While much of the art in Robert Storr’s highly political group show is simply wrong-headed, some of it is downright ugly. If you believe Storr’s hanging, you might just think that anti-Americanism and “New antisemitism” are at the forefront of avant-garde art.
Take this installation by Raymond Pettibon, installed in one of the rooms of Storr’s Padiglione Italia. Unless I am mistaken, a graffitied screed that reads “America loves (adores) Israel” and “Alan Dershowitz, David Horowitz, Hilary Clinton, Hilary Kristol, Hilary Kramer: Post-op or same person” is not meant as a paean to Zionism, American foreign policy, neoconservatives, or for that matter the co-editor of this magazine.
This is frightening stuff. One hopes it is not a harbinger of art’s future. Why Storr chooses to embrace it–that’s another question entirely.
I’ll have more to say about Venice this week in The Wall Street Journal.