The  Plot  Against  Art, Part 2

Dr Lasha Darkmoon

September 20, 2009

I hate to tell you this, but if you like modern art there has to be something radically wrong with you. To feel hostile towards it is as natural as being repelled by incest.

Modern art is out to corrupt you.

If it doesn’t do this, it will have failed to achieve the primary purpose of its elitist promoters. It will have failed to undermine traditional values. It will have failed to produce a “culture of pessimism.” It will have failed to destroy the sacral core of life. It will have failed to poison your mind and give you the sickness unto death.  It will have failed to make you what Big Brother finally managed to make Winston Smith in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four:  a mindless zombie.

The Wheelers and Dealers

That the Jews dominate the art world, as they dominate the mass media and every other area of influence, is the best-kept secret of the twenty-first century. One is not supposed to mention this. It is anti-Semitic to do so.

In 1989, an erudite academic volume appeared called Sociology of the Arts. In it the authors discuss who is who in the art world. “Blacks, Orientals, and persons of Spanish origin constitute about 7 per cent of the art audience,” the book informs us helpfully. So what about the other 93 per cent?

What ethnic group owns most of the art galleries? Who are the museum curators? Who are the art historians? Who are the art critics? Who publish the magazines in which art is reviewed? Who determine what is good art and what is rubbish? Who are the dealers and big collectors? Who run the auction houses? Who set up the art competitions and raise the prize money? Who appoint the judges? Who are  the judges?

Not a word. Total silence. Scary, isn’t it?

As far back as 1930, it was noted by French author Pierre Assouline: “According to dealer Pierre Loeb, four art dealers out of five are Jewish, as are four out of five art collectors. Wilhelm Unde added art critics to this list.” In 1973, it was estimated that 80 per cent of the 2500 core “art market personnel” — dealers, curators, gallery owners, collectors, critics, consultants and patrons of the arts — were Jewish.  In 1982, Gerald Krefetz (Jewish) let the cat out of the bag even further.  “Today, Jews enjoy every phase of the art world,” he admitted. “In some circles, the wheelers and dealers are referred to as the Jewish mafia.” 

Writing of his experiences in New York City, Jewish author Howard Jacobson revealed that art critic Peter Schjedhal had told him, “Just about every gallery we go into is run by a Jew. Even the women gallery owners whose wine we absorb are Jewish.” 

In 2001, ARTnews listed the world’s Top Ten Art Collectors. Eight of them were Jews. Ponder these staggering statistics: A people who constitute 0.2% of the world’s population make up 80% of the world’s richest art collectors. Out of every thousand people in the world, roughly two are Jews. To be precise, one in every 457 people are Jews. Yet go to a conference at which 1000 of the world’s wealthiest art collectors have gathered and you will find, to your amazement, that 800 of them are Jewish! Phenomenal, isn’t it?   

Nigerian-born Chris Ofili's Holy Virgin Mary, from the collection of Charles Saatchi, an influential Jewish art collector. The painting is described  as "a carefully rendered black Madonna decorated with a resin-covered lump of elephant dung. The figure is also surrounded by small collaged images of female genitalia from pornographic magazines." The painting caused a public uproar and media frenzy when exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum of Art as part of the Sensation exhibition of Saatchi's collection in 1999.

If you require confirmation for these citations, see here. This huge cache of outré information has been particularly useful to me in researching the Jewish influence on modern art.

The art world is so densely populated with Jews that one way to get away from the goyim, if you are Jewish, is to take up art. That way, with any luck, you won’t bump into a non-Jew for days! In 1996, Jewish art historian Eunice Lipton confided somewhat tactlessly that the only reason she became an art historian was that she wanted to hang out exclusively with Jews. “I wanted to be where Jews were — that is, I wanted a profession that would allow me to acknowledge my Jewishness through the company I kept.”

On the face of it, she noted, art history would seem to be a gentile profession, if only because the study of Christian art was its hub and center. And yet, she says, “the field was filled with Jews. One might even say it was shaped by them.” 

She was doubtless thinking of the great historian of Renaissance art, Bernard Berenson, whose influence has been seminal.  Berenson once described himself as “a typical Talmud Jew” who longed to drop “the mask of the goyim” — hardly, one is tempted to think, a fit interpreter of Christian art to the hated gentiles! Though he had converted to Christianity in 1885, here we see him, almost sixty years later in 1944,  writing an “Open Letter to the Jews” in which he warns them about “envious Christians” who would persecute them “even if you were innocent as the angels.” To my mind, this sounds more Talmudic than Christian. 

With the rise of German fascism, Jewish art historians began to flee Nazi Germany, along with those Marxist revolutionaries known as the Frankfurt School. Most of these Jews ended up in America. At New York University alone, the following Jewish art historians were to take up residence: Richard Ettinghaven, Walter Friedlander, Karl Lehman, Alfred Salmony, Guido Schoenberger, Martin Weinberger.

Art historian Lipton probably also has in mind — when she says she wanted to live in a predominantly Jewish atmosphere — the two most illustrious art critics of the twentieth century, Harold Rosenberg and Clement Greenberg. Like Berenson, Greenberg appears to have had a distinctly Talmudic cast of mind. Convinced of Jewish superiority, he once remarked, “The European Jew represents a higher type of human being than any other yet achieved.”

Both these influential critics, Rosenberg and Greenberg, were members of the Frankfurt School and helped to reshape the aesthetic perceptions of the gentile masses.

Bending Art to Jewish Abilities

All art henceforth was to be “Jewish”. It would break free from its Christian roots. Whatever Jewish artists were good at, that would be the art of the future. If Jews were no good at drawing, good drawing would no longer be necessary. Representational art was out, abstract and conceptual art was in. Actual unmade beds, not pictures of them, now became works of art. Marcel Duchamp's famous urinals — bought in a store and transported to an art gallery where they were magically transformed into works of art. Cans stuffed with the artist’s own excrement. Photos of crucifixes stuck in glasses of the artist’s own urine.

Marcel Duchamp's Fountain, photographed in 1917 by Alfred Steiglitz, an early 20th-century Jewish photographer and promoter of modern art. “It does not take much stretching of the imagination,” gushes Calvin Tomkins, art critic of the New Yorker, “to see in the urinal’s gently flowing curves the veiled head of a classic Renaissance Madonna or a seated Buddha.” In 2004, this inspired pissoire was voted Most Influential Work of the 20th century by 500 “art experts” — sorry, “piss-artists.”

“Preparation of these items places no demand on artistic abilities. They can be done by anybody,” Israel Shamir points out, adding somewhat cuttingly, “Such art is perfectly within Jewish capabilities.”

In order to succeed in this difficult profession, the visually challenged Jews had to “bend art to fit their abilities.” It is as if, unable to excel at athletic prowess, the Jews had somehow managed to gain control over the Olympic Games and decreed that, from now on, sprinting and marathon running were no longer important. What really mattered was winning the sack race or the Spitting Competition — accomplishments, possibly, which Jews were particularly good at!  

“The Jews were extremely ill equipped for their conquest of Olympus,” Shamir instructs us. “For many generations, Jews never entered churches and hardly ever saw paintings. They were conditioned to reject image as part of their rejection of idols.” In short, the Jews were visually handicapped. Trained in Talmudic dialectics, they were marvelous with words. They had a verbal IQ of 130. Their IQ for patterns and pictures, however, was dismally low: only 75.

The Jews of course don’t wish to acknowledge this. To suggest that they tend to make lousy artists is anti-Semitic. If Jews didn’t make more of a splash as artists in past ages, it is argued, it was because they were “held back” by their Christian oppressors. Unfortunately for the Jews, the great Berenson will have none of this argument.  “The Jews have displayed little talent for the visual,” he states tersely, “and almost none for the figure arts.”

How, then, you might wish to know, are there so many Jewish artists around nowadays? To what can we attribute this fantastic efflorescence of sudden Jewish pictorial genius? The answer, we are told, lies in Jewish networking and hustling: Jewish predominance in the mass media, Jewish economic dominance of the art world, Jewish power, Jewish money.”

How Anyone Can Be Famous

Andy Warhol once said that everyone in the future will be “world-famous for fifteen minutes.” What he failed to point out was that almost anyone, including the village idiot, can be made into a celebrity with the help of public relations. All it takes is constant attention in the mass media.  Charles Saatchi, advertising mogul and art collector extraordinaire, spells it out: “An unknown artist’s big glass vitrine holding a rotten cow’s head covered by maggots and swarms of buzzing flies may be pretty unsalable. Until the artist becomes a star. Then he can sell anything he touches” (my emphasis).

 Damien Hirst, A Thousand Years (1990). Richard Lacayo of Time Magazine: “A Thousand Years is a large glass box in which real maggots hatch into flies that appear to feed on blood from a severed cow’s head.” Charles Saatchi and Hirst had a "symbiotic relationship" as collector and artist from about 1992–2003.

How does one become a star? Who gives the Emperor his new clothes and helps to suggest he is remarkably well dressed?

An unmade bed is transformed into a consummate work of art once it is bought by Charles Saatchi and placed in a prestigious art gallery. The artist acquires a mystique created out of the power of suggestion. You must be a genius if everyone is raving about you and your unmade bed. Mass hypnosis does the trick. Advertising and persistent persuasion work wonders. See here and here and here. 

Let me ask you a question. If someone tried to sell you his excrement for $10, would you buy it? Probably not. Well, consider this: on May 23, 2007, a can labeled Artist’s Shit, purportedly containing the excrement of artist Piero Manzoni, was sold at Sotheby’s for €124,000 (US$ 180,000).

How is it done? Is a can of shit worth its weight in gold? It obviously is — if people are fighting to buy it.

A larger question: If you can con people into buying shit, can you also con them into evil wars in the Middle East and mass cultural suicide in their own homelands? Nothing easier. It’s being done right now.

Talent helps, but is it essential?

You will be surprised to learn that some Jewish artists, despite Berenson’s sweeping dismissal of their visual abilities, are actually quite good at painting. For example, Modigliani and Chagall. Shamir attributes some of their excellence, however, to the influence of Christianity. These two Jewish artists became Christians. This helped, Shamir thinks, to make them good painters. At least they had something to say now. Life had taken on a new meaning. They weren’t just scratching their existential sores and whining “God is dead!”

On the other hand, there were other artists who remained firmly within the Jewish camp and managed to distinguish themselves: notably, Pissarro (impressionist), Soutine (expressionist), Max Ernst (surrealist), and Tamara de Lempicka (art deco). To succeed as an artist in the new milieu, it helped if you were Jewish. Thus both Frida Kahlo and Gustav Klimt arguably owed their initial success to the fact that everyone thought they were Jewish. They were not, but somehow managed to give that impression.

The important thing to remember in all this is that artistic talent had become, strictly speaking, non-essential. It helped, but promotion by a good publicist helped more. The artist had to be a showman rather than a skilled craftsman. Neither Tracey Emin (patchwork quilt) nor Damien Hirst (shark preserved in formaldehyde) found it necessary to create their own works of art. Cheap manual assistants were often hired to do this for them. The vital thing in their art was the original concept. The end product was of secondary importance.

Tell Me Something Beautiful  is a patchwork quilt stitched up entirely by eight-year-olds from Ecclesbourne primary school, London, with Emin in the classroom offering advice. When the school wanted to sell the quilt for £35.000 ($60,000) to an art dealer, Emin threw a fit and threatened legal action, demanding the quilt be “returned” to her at once.

The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living by Damien Hirst (1991). Saatchi sold this work to collector Steven Cohen for $12 million, who in in turn donated it to the Museum of Modern Art.

The successful contemporary artist needs to be a person devoid of moral scruples. Confidence trickster, hustler, prostitute, pimp, he needs to mix with the right crowd and know whom to cultivate. “The artist who would be known,” wrote the great folklorist Joseph Campbell, “has to go to cocktail parties to win commissions, and those who win them are not in their studios but at parties, meeting the right people and appearing in the right places.” Campbell was later accused of anti-Semitism, but Jewish artist Julian Schnabel backs up Campbell’s claim. “Much time is spent nurturing liaisons with creatures of the art world,” he notes gloomily. “There is no time for friendship. Later, there is no capacity for it.”

How does a really talented artist succeed in such a rat race?

Painter Helen Frankenthaler had to sleep with art critic Clement Greenberg, but it was worth it: Greenberg gave her good reviews. Willem de Kooning let his wife Elaine bed down with art critic Harold Rosenberg, but it was worth it: Rosenberg gave de Kooning good reviews. Jackson Pollock had to pleasure nymphomaniac Peggy Guggenheim, but it was worth it: her patronage helped to get Pollock good reviews. After all, her daddy owned the Guggenheim Museum. 

None of these artists slept around for love. They did it for money. Jackson Pollock famously said of Peggy Guggenheim, his plutocratic patroness: “To fuck her, you’d have to put a towel over her head. And she did want fucking.”

“Incestuous collusion, mutual back-scratching, under the table wheeling and dealing, nepotism and clique allegiance are intrinsic principles of the modern art world,” art expert Sophy Burnham concludes ruefully.

That’s how it is. C’est la vie! It’s so heartbreaking you have to laugh.

If you wish to succeed as a modern artist, be prepared to lie and cheat, to be a confidence trickster and sexual exhibitionist, to flatter your Jewish patrons and churn out Holocaust paintings to please them, to sing the praises of Israel and vilify the Palestinians, to knock Islam and the Qur’an and show contempt for Christianity. Unless you are Jewish, you must lose all allegiance to your people, your religion, or your traditional culture.

Be prepared to prostitute yourself if you’re a woman or pimp your wife if you’re a man. Be prepared to do a Piss Christ like Andres Serrano or a pornographic Holy Virgin Mary like Chris Ofili. Be prepared, like Grayson Perry, to dress up as a woman and produce sexually perverted pots. Be prepared to pull a paper scroll out of your vagina like Carolee Schneemann. Be prepared, like Vito Acconci, to titillate a jaded public by masturbating for them in a prestigious art gallery — and calling it ‘art’. 

Leonardo must be turning in his grave.

Let art critic Clement Greenberg have the last word: “I’ve decided the kind of people attracted to art are often psychopaths. You can quote me on that.” 

He should know.