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Old November 23rd, 2012 #1
Pat Bateman
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Default $75 Million Rothko Painting Leads Sotheby's Record-Setting Sale of Judenscheisse

A general rule regarding art:

If it takes 4 jews to explain what you're looking at - you're looking at shit.




$75 Million Rothko Leads Sotheby's Record-Setting Sale
By Kelly Crow

Sotheby's sold a Mark Rothko abstract for $75 million on Tuesday in a contemporary-art auction whose total—$375 million—surpassed any in its company history.


This Mark Rothko abstract sold for $75 million Fittingly, the Rothko painting is titled, "No. 1 (Royal Red & Blue)."

The sale of the 1954 Rothko—with its floating red, pink and blue rectangles—pushed the auction house's sale total over the $362 million it got from a similar evening sale in May 2008 that marked the peak of the last market cycle. It's unclear whether Tuesday's performance amounts to a similar cresting, but in the short term it could boost collectors' confidence in art values—especially after last week's disappointing sales of Impressionist and modern art.

Rothko is a master of Abstract Expressionism, and his midcentury meditations on color and modernism typically sell well in good times and bad: Sotheby's caused a stir five years ago when it sold one of his 1950 abstracts for $72.8 million, a record price at the time. Four months ago, Christie's in New York topped that price by getting $86.8 million for a 1961 Rothko, "Orange, Red, Yellow."

Dealers said the Rothko sold well in part because of its size—it is 9½ feet tall—and its tropical hues, which are as saturated as a sunset. As a work of Abstract Expressionism, the Rothko also dovetails with current collecting tastes: Lately, buyers from Omaha to Okinawa have been seeking out colorful works from the postwar period when America, and its artists, prospered. Today, many of these 1950s and 1960s abstracts have trickled out of the marketplace and into museums, so collectors pounce whenever major examples come up for sale.

Sotheby's offered up a group of eight postwar abstracts from the collection of department-store magnate Sidney Kohl and his wife, Dorothy, led by Jackson Pollock's $40.4 million "Number 4, 1951."
Besides the Rothko, Sotheby's offered up a group of eight postwar abstracts from the collection of department-store magnate Sidney Kohl and his wife, Dorothy. All sold well and collectively brought in over $100 million—nearly a quarter of the sale's entire total. Leading this Kohl group was Jackson Pollock $40.4 million "Number 4, 1951," a drippy, honeybee-colored canvas that was estimated to sell for up to $35 million.


Jackson Pollock's $40.4 million "Number 4, 1951."

The telephone bidder who won it also paid Sotheby's $19.6 million for Willem de Kooning, "Abstraction," within its $15 million to $20 million asking price. Another piece from the Kohls, Clyfford Still's "1948-H," sold for $9.8 million.


Despite the fact that Sotheby's York Avenue saleroom was packed with heavyweight collectors like Eli Broad from Los Angeles, Stefan Edlis from Chicago and Donald Bryant from New York, many of the sale's pieces went to fresh faces. An unassuming brunette sitting midway back outbid rivals to win a $9.3 million Franz Kline, "Shenandoah." Minutes later, she paid $6.2 million for an untitled Joan Mitchell abstract. A Chinese man with ruddy cheeks sitting in the front row won a $722,500 Roy Lichtenstein sculpture.

Sotheby's had to work hard to get bidders to stretch for other works, though. It only took a single telephone bid for a collector to win a $17.4 million Gerhard Richter "Abstract Painting" from 1990, and other examples by Arshile Gorky, Jean-Michel Basquiat and John Currin traded hands after only a single bid.

Yet overall, 58 of Sotheby's 69 works found buyers, and that helped the house achieve a rare 95.6% of its sale's potential value.

Christie's will counter with its own contemporary art sale on Wednesday.

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Old November 23rd, 2012 #2
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Mark Rothko, Abstract Expressionism and the Decline of Western Art, Part 1
By Brenton Sanderson



Mark Rothko

The life and career of Abstract Expressionist painter Mark Rothko is a prototypical Jewish story that encapsulates a range of themes discussed at The Occidental Observer. Central to Rothko’s story is the political radicalism of eastern European Jewish migrants arriving in the United States between 1880 and 1920; the reflexive hostility of these migrants and their descendents to the traditional people and culture of their new homeland, and how this hostility was reflected in the artistic and intellectual currents that dominated Western societies during the twentieth century. Rothko’s story also exemplifies other familiar themes including: the force of Jewish ethnic networking and nepotism in promoting Jewish interests, and the tendency for Jewish “genius” to be constructed by the Jewish intellectual establishment as self-appointed gatekeepers of Western culture.

With Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko has been accorded a leading place in the ranks of the Abstract Expressionists. If there is such a thing as a cult artist among the liberal Jewish intelligentsia, then Rothko is probably it. Important people stand in grave silence before his empty expanses with looks on their faces that bespeak lofty thoughts. As a critic for The Times noted:
Rothko evokes all that could be criticized as most pretentious, most clannish, most pseudish about his spectators. They stand there gravely perusing something that to the outsider probably looks more like a patch of half-stripped wallpaper than a picture and then declare themselves profoundly moved. And many outsiders will start to wonder if they are being duped, if this Modernist emperor actually has no clothes on and his fans are just the blind followers of some aesthetic faith.
For critics like Ottmann, Rothko’s genius is indisputable and he possessed an “extraordinary talent” that enabled him to transfer his metaphysical “impulses to the canvas with a power and magnetism that stuns viewers of his work… In fact Rothko’s skill in achieving this result – whether intentional or not – perhaps explains why he was once called “the melancholic rabbi.”“[i] For prominent Jewish art historian Simon Schama, Rothko’s “big vertical canvasses of contrasting bars of colour, panels of colour stacked up on top of each other” qualify Rothko as “a maker of paintings as powerful and complicated as anything by his two gods – Rembrandt and Turner.” For the ethnocentric Schama “these [Rothko’s] paintings are equivalent of these old masters… Can art ever be more complete, more powerful? I don’t think so.”[ii]

After experimenting with Expressionism and Surrealism, Rothko arrived in 1949 at the signature style that would typify his work until his death by suicide in 1970 at the age of 66. This consisted of two or three floating rectangles of colour painted against a monochrome background. A pioneer of “colour-field” painting, Rothko claimed that only abstract painting could express the “full gravity of religious yearnings and the angst of the human condition.” His final works became so minimalistic (large black canvasses) as to be almost void of any substance.


White Centre (Yellow, Pink and Lavender on Rose) by Mark Rothko (1960): Sold at auction in 2007 for $73 million

The Making of Mark Rothko

Born in 1903, Marcus Rothkowitz was the youngest child of pharmacist, Jacob Rothkowitz, and his wife, Anna Goldin Rothkowitz, in the Russian city of Dvinsk (today Daugavpils, Latvia). Dvinsk was located at the time within the Jewish Pale of Settlement. The Pale was then inhabited by five million Jews who were confined there by the Tsar at a time when thousands of Polish Jews came across the border into Russia seeking work. Rothko’s father was the stereotype of the leftwing Jewish intellectual, who presided over a family with an “intense commitment to politics and education.”[iii] He initially preferred secular education for his children, and political over religious involvement. According to Rothko, his father’s relation to formal religion was openly oppositional: “My father was a militant social democrat of the Jewish party, the Bund, which was the social democracy of that time. He was profoundly Marxist and violently anti-religious.”[iv]

That this was chiefly an anti-Christian rather than anti-religious impulse is revealed by the fact that he returned to the Orthodox Jewish fold after Marcus’s birth in response to the pogroms which followed the failed Russian Revolution of 1905. While no pogroms were visited on the Jews of Dvinsk, the town witnessed occasional incidents where Jews were targeted as sympathizers of the Social Democratic and other revolutionary parties.[v] In 1905, according to Rothko’s biographer, Jacob Baal-Teshuva, the young Rothko’s “hometown was under the blanket surveillance of the Tsarist secret police. Jews were the usual victims of reprisals whenever the Cossacks, the loyal followers of the Tsarist state, came into the town to break revolutionary uprisings. Other Jewish communities in the environs of Dvinsk also lived in constant terror of pogroms and massacres. The air was filled with slogans like “Kill the Jews to Save Russia.” This was the atmosphere in which Rothko grew up.”[vi]

While there were no pogroms or mass graves in Dvinsk, Rothko would later say that “as a child he could remember the local Cossacks indulging in their favourite activity – beating up Jews,” and later “claimed to recall dug-up pits in the forests around Dvinsk, where the Cossacks buried Jewish victims they had kidnapped and murdered. These images always plagued him mentally, and he says they exercised a certain influence on his painting.”[vii] Baal-Teshuva forgives Rothko these obvious untruths by pointing out that it is likely “that the child heard adults talking about the pogroms and massacres elsewhere, and in his memory ended up mixing up these stories with his own memories of the nearby woods.”[viii] Nevertheless, he acknowledges that some critics have willingly run with these falsehoods and have “gone so far as to say this explains his preference for rectangular forms in his late works, as a formal echo of the grave.”[ix]

In response to the economic insecurities and political dangers of life in the Pale, Marcus’s father migrated to the United States in 1910. Only in 1913, when Marcus was ten years old, did the rest of the family move to America.[x] Despite the apparent dangers of life for Jews in the Pale, Rothko “referred often to the ‘terrible experience’ of having been torn away from his homeland against his will.”[xi] It has been noted that it was certainly not American culture that attracted the waves of Jewish migrants from Central and Eastern Europe, but only the relatively advantageous conditions created by American economic growth. “They came to America’s shores” notes Muller, “motivated not by religion but in spite of it, their more orthodox leaders being inclined to warn them against the dangers of godless and goyish America.”[xii]

As an educated family and active Zionists, the Rothkowitz family spoke Hebrew in addition to Russian and Yiddish. Whereas the older siblings attended public schools along with many other Jewish children concentrated in one neighbourhood of Portland, father Rothkowitz decided that Marcus would receive a strict religious education. He was sent to a cheder, the religious school run by the synagogue, starting at the age of five, where he was subject to a strict and tiring routine: praying, reading and translation of Hebrew texts, and rote memorization of Talmudic law.[xiii]


Rothkowitz family portrait: Marcus second from the right

Rothko’s parents saw no contradiction in bringing up their son as an Orthodox Jew, a Zionist, and a Communist. This is quite in keeping with Kevin MacDonald’s observation that “within Russian Jewish communities, the acceptance of radical political ideology often coexisted with messianic forms of Zionism as well as intense commitment to Jewish nationalism and religious and cultural separatism, and many individuals held various and often rapidly changing combinations of these ideas.”[xiv]

Baal-Teshuva relates that “after the family had achieved a degree of economic security in Portland, they began to join local chapters of radical movements. The sensitive and rather nervous Marcus was similarly inclined, and increasingly participated in discussions on current affairs. He argued quite skilfully for the right of workers to strike, or for general access to contraception. His entire family was in favour of the Bolshevik Revolution, as Rothko later said.”[xv] This was, of course, very typical, with Jewish historian Norman Cantor noting that “in the first half of the twentieth century, Marxist-Leninist communism ran like an electromagnetic lightning flash through Jewish societies from Moscow to Western Europe, the United States and Canada, gaining the lifelong adherence of brilliant, passionately dedicated Jewish men and women.”[xvi]

Another “Jewish Genius” Gets Stung by the WASPS

Rothko was, according to Schama, very much one of these brilliant Jewish men, and despite his Orthodox Jewish education, was “no Jewish Trappist, but a much more recognizable type (at least to me): loquacious, exuberant, hot-tempered, deeply immersed in literature and history.” While the Orthodox Judaism in which Rothko was schooled was not directly expressed in his art, Schama insists that “once you”ve done cheder – Hebrew school – it never really goes away, however much you try to banish it; nor did it for Marcus. He was what everyone would call, with smiles, both admiring and pitying, a chocom – a know-it-all. And what do chochoms do if they weren’t going to be rabbis?[xvii] He was, Schama insists, “just your super-educated, ungainly, sentimental Jew. In the grip of mighty ideas, he was desperate to tell you all about them, fidgeting on the sofa and waving his arms all around. A big heart and a big mouth to match – you know the type.”[xviii]

Rothko excelled academically at Lincoln High School in Portland, and was a passionate debater for the radical cause, and “went to hear the firecracker orator “Red” Emma Goldman attack capitalism and sing the praises of the Bolshevik Revolution.”[xix]


A youthful influence: Emma Goldman

Schama tells us that Rothko was “scholarship material, and won a place at Yale before the Ivy League decided they were about to be inundated by clever Jews and imposed admission quotas. But, Rothko felt the sting of the WASPS all the same. If they couldn’t actually evict the talky-smart kikes, “those people,’ they could at least make it hard for them to stick around.”[xx] According to Baal-Teshuva, Rothko and his fellow Jewish students from Portland soon discovered the difficulties of gaining social acceptance in a setting where “the majority of generally affluent White Anglo-Saxon Protestants were contemptuous of the Jewish minority.”[xxi] Exactly how these WASP students were supposed (or even remotely likely) to embrace a group who feted Emma Goldman, were deeply hostile to their people and culture, and who longed for the day when a violent revolution would consign them and their kind to the dustbin of history, and elevate Jews like Rothko to their supposedly deserved high status is unclear.

At the end of a year spent studying mostly history of philosophy and psychology, Rothko’s scholarship was rescinded and replaced with a student loan – this event being held ever after as a prime example of the systematic anti-Semitism Rothko confronted at Yale. He lived off-campus with relatives in New Haven, and launched a radical underground newspaper called the Saturday Evening Post “which took aim at the college’s teaching methods and fetish for prestige.”[xxii] He dropped out of Yale after his second year, and moved to New York where he took further courses at the Art Students League in 1925 and took lessons in drawing from nature.

Soon thereafter, Rothko enrolled in the class of Max Weber, the Jewish American painter who taught a course in still-life. Weber and Rothko had both come to the United States as Russian-Jewish immigrants at the age of ten.[xxiii] Marcus also gathered experience in advertising, and was hired to draw maps and illustrations for the Graphic Bible by Lewis Browne, a retired rabbi from Portland who had become a best-selling author. When Rothko saw he was not credited as the creator of these works, he sued Browne for $20,000 in damages. In the end, he lost the trial.[xxiv]

When the Wall Street crash came in 1929, followed by the Great Depression, Rothko had little to show for his decade in New York. He was exhibited but not much sold, and when he did sell his work, it was not enough to make a living. “He was married to Edith Sachar, bright and Jewish, whom he had met at a progressive summer camp at Lake George in the Adirondacks: downing dialectical materialism, Freud and Cubism along with the weak coffee.”[xxv]

Living in a Jewish world— New York art scene branch.

REFERENCES

Baal-Teshuva, J. (2009) Rothko, Taschen, Cologne, Germany.

Breslin, J.E.B. (1998) Mark Rothko: A Biography, University of Chicago Press, Chicago.

Cantor, N.E. (1994) The Sacred Chain – The History of the Jews, HarperCollins, New York.

MacDonald, K. B. (1998/2001) The Culture of Critique: An Evolutionary Analysis of Jewish Involvement in Twentieth‑Century Intellectual and Political Movements, Westport, CT: Praeger. Revised Paperback edition, 2001, Bloomington, IN: 1stbooks Library.

Muller, J.Z. (2010) Capitalism and the Jews, Princeton University Press.

Ottmann, K. (2003) The Essential Mark Rothko, Harry N. Abrams, New York.

Schama, S. (2006) Simon Schama’s Power of Art, BBC Books, Great Britain.

Schama, S. (2006a) Simon Schama’s Power of Art, BBC TV Series, Great Britain.

ENDNOTES
[i] Ottmann p. 8

[ii] Schama 2006a

[iii] Breslin p. 14

[iv] Ibid. p. 15

[v] Baal-Teshuva p. 19

[vi] Ibid. p. 19-20

[vii] Schama 2006a

[viii] Baal-Teshuva p. 19-20

[ix] Ibid. p. 19-20

[x] Ibid. p. 20

[xi] Ottmann p. 17

[xii] Muller p. 96

[xiii] Baal-Teshuva p. 20

[xiv] MacDonald (1998/2001) p. 82

[xv] Baal-Teshuva p. 23

[xvi] Cantor p. 281


[xvii] Schama p. 401-402

[xviii] Schama 2006a

[xix] Schama p. 402

[xx] Ibid. p. 402

[xxi] Baal-Teshuva p. 23

[xxii] Ibid. p. 23

[xxiii] Ibid. p. 23

[xxiv] Ibid. p. 24

[xxv] Schama p. 405
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Old November 23rd, 2012 #3
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Creating a new “American” Art
by Brenton Sanderson


Before the rise of Abstract Expressionism, the American art scene after World War I was defined by two main currents. The first were what one might call the Regionalists (e.g. Grant Wood, Thomas Hart Benton and John Steuart Curry) who used their own signature styles to portray the virtues of the hard-working rural American population. In the second group were the artists of Social Realism (e.g. Ben Shahn and Diego Rivera), whose work reflected urban life during the Great Depression, and reflected a preoccupation with international socialism.

Neither of these two schools was interested in abstract art. Despite the leftwing view of the social realists, both groups held rather conservative attitudes on figurative representation. Yet, even as these two styles dominated, the artists of the nascent New York School “met frequently at the legendary Cedar Bar, where they discussed their radical theses. They argued endlessly about the problems of art, about how to effect a total break with the art of the past, about the mission of creating an abstract art that no longer had anything to do with conventional techniques and motifs.”[i]


Spring in the Country by Grant Wood (1941)

The Museum of Modern Art did not yet exist; the Metropolitan Museum tended to “look down its WASP patrician nose at modernism”; and the Whitney favoured exactly the kind of American painting young Rothko most despised: scenic, provincial, anecdotal, and conservative.[ii] For a Jewish outsider like Rothko, who in 1970 declared that he would never feel entirely at home in a land to which he had been transplanted against his will, urban America was his America.
But what was on the mid-town gallery walls was, for the most part, another America altogether: Big Skies, fruited plain, purple mountain majesty, the light of providence shining on the prairie. About that America Rothko knew little and cared less. Early on, he had the sense that America ought to offer an art that was as new and vital as its history; but he also wanted that art to play for high stakes, to be hooked up somehow to the universal ideas he was chain-smoking his way through. Just what such an art might look like, however, he had as yet not the slightest idea.[iii]
Terry Cooney points out how the New York Intellectuals associated rural America with “nativism, anti-Semitism, nationalism, and fascism as well as with anti-intellectualism and provincialism.” By contrast the urban was associated “with ethnic and cultural tolerance, with internationalism, and with advanced ideas.” A basic assumption of the New York Intellectuals was that rural America “with which they associated much of American tradition and most of the territory beyond New York – had little to contribute to a cosmopolitan culture” and could accordingly be dismissed by writers who, by examining all issues through this lens, could “mask assertions of superiority and expressions of anti-democratic sentiments as the judgements of an objective expertise.”[iv]

Rothko’s skill in rendering the human form was poor, as is evident in early works like Bathers of Beach Scene (Untitled) (1933/4). Schama admits as much, noting that: “When he [Rothko] stood in the Brooklyn classroom it all seemed so easy. He would tell the children not to mind the rules – painting, he said, was as natural as singing. It should be like music, but when he tried it came out as a croak. It’s the work of a painfully knotted imagination… No not very good.”[v]


Bathers or Beach Scene (Untitled) 1933/4 by Mark Rothko

Drawing on his boyhood training as Talmudic scholar, Rothko, in a speech in the mid-thirties on art education delivered at the Jewish Education Center in Brooklyn (where he began teaching in 1929) offered a quasi-philosophical rationale for the unimportance of technical skill by stressing “the difference between sheer skill, and skill that is linked to spirit, expressiveness and personality. … The result is a constant creative activity in which the child creates an entire child-like cosmology, which expresses the infinitely varied and exciting world of a child’s fancies and experience.” Rothko believed that one’s means of artistic expression was “unrelated to manual ability or painterly technique, that it is drawn from an inborn feeling for form; the ideal lies in the spontaneity, simplicity and directness of children.”[vi] Such grandiloquent pronouncements from Rothko were not unusual, with Matthew Collings noting that “Rothko was outrageously over-fruity and grandiose in his statements about art and religion and the solemn importance of his own art.”[vii]

This tendency on the part of Rothko prompted one writer to declare: “What I find amazing … is how a painting which is two rectangles of different colors can somehow prompt thousands upon thousands of words on the human condition, Marxist dialectics, and social construction.” He suggests that a good rule of thumb is “that the more obtuse terms an artist and his supporters use to describe a work, the less worth the painting has. By this definition Rothko may be the most worthless artist in the history of humanity.” Another critic humorously observed that:
Rothko needed to be fluent in rationalizing his existence and validating himself as a relevant artist to the average idiot who spent tens of thousands of dollars on paintings which could be easily reproduced by anyone with a pulse and a paint brush. Rothko… learned to garner attention to his paintings by getting into a frenzied drama-queen state and hysterically claiming that his works were deep, profound statements and not just indiscriminate blobs of color. They were expressions that rejected society’s expectation of technical expertise, actual talent and an artist’s evolution over time.
Lasha Darkmoon has noted the tendency of Jewish artists to set about redefining the very nature of artistic excellence to allow for their own technical inadequacies. She observes that: “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.” She cites Israel Shamir who notes that the “Preparation of these items [of non-figurative art] places no demand on artistic abilities. They can be done by anybody,” and that “such art is perfectly within Jewish capabilities.” Darkmoon elaborates:
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 [Jewish art critic] 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.
Roger Scruton has observed how the presence of significant financial incentives served to hasten the death of traditional painting by “devaluing the fund of artistic knowledge and encouraging minor talents to dispense with the humility which might otherwise have caused them to study and emulate the masters.”[viii]

As well as self-interestedly seeking to redefine the nature of great art, Rothko often spoke out for the importance of “artistic freedom,” which in practice meant artistic freedom for those on the Left. He became involved in the famed 1934 incident between John D. Rockefeller and the socialist painter, Diego Rivera. This began when Rivera was hired to paint a huge mural in the lobby of the main building of Rockefeller Center, the newly completed showcase of the oil baron’s ideals. Shortly before Rivera completed his work, Rockefeller dropped in and saw that the mural had a defiantly socialist message based on a heroic depiction of Lenin. He ordered the removal of the mural, resulting in its destruction. After this incident, a group of 200 New York artists gathered to protest against Rockefeller, and Rothko marched with them.[ix]


Detail from copy of Diego Rivera’s Mural for Rockefeller Center – Tribute to Lenin (1934)

In 1934 Rothko was one of the original 200 founding members of the Art Union and started the Gallery Secession, which was devoted to the newest artistic tendencies. A year later he became a member of the group who called themselves “The Ten” (the minimum number of Jews that can pray together). This unashamed exercise in Jewish ethnic networking was an opportunity for Rothko and his colleagues to engage in mutual admiration and promotion, and agitate in favour of “experimentation” and against conservatism in museums, schools and galleries.[x] Among “The Ten” were Ben Zion, Adolph Gottlieb, Louis Harris, Yankel Kufeld, Louis Schanker, Joseph Solman, Nahum Chazbazov, Ilya Bolotovsky and Marcus Rothkowitz. Gottlieb, in describing the group, later recalled: “We were outcasts, roughly expressionist painters. We were not acceptable to most dealers and collectors. We banded together for the purpose of mutual support.” The Ten acted as an alliance against the promotion of regionalist art by the Whitney Museum of American Art, which to them was simply too “provincial” for words.[xi]

For Rothko, “the whole problem of art was to establish human values in this specific [American] civilization.”[xii] The pronounced ingroup-outgroup mentality of “The Ten” was consistent with that existing within the Jewish intellectual movements reviewed by Kevin MacDonald in Culture of Critique, where he observes how Norman Podhoretz described the group of Jewish intellectuals centred around Partisan Review as a “family” that derived from “the feeling of beleaguered isolation shared with masters of the modernist movement themselves, elitism – the conviction that others are not worth taking into consideration except to attack, and need not be addressed in one’s writing; out of the feeling as well as a sense of hopelessness as to the fate of American culture at large and the correlative conviction that integrity and standards were only possible among ‘us.’”[xiii]

MacDonald notes, moreover, that within these alienated and marginalised Jewish groups was “an atmosphere of social support that undoubtedly functioned as had traditional Jewish ingroup solidarity arrayed against a morally and intellectually inferior outside world.”[xiv] Nonetheless, despite the ethnic superglue, there was tension within the Jewish milieu of “The Ten”, with Schama noting that: “Amidst the usual Talmudic bickering of leftist factions, the denunciations and walk-outs, Rothkowitz and his comrades were all burning to make an art that would say something about the alienation, as they saw it, of modern American life.”[xv]

Since the triumph of the culture of critique and the Jewish seizure of the commanding heights of Western high culture in the sixties and seventies, this pattern of Jewish ethnic networking has become an entrenched feature of the modern art establishment. Scruton observes how “the new impresario surrounds himself with others of his kind, promoting them to all committees which are relevant to his status, and expecting to be promoted in his turn. Thus arises the modernist establishment, which has dominated the official culture of Europe for the last three decades, and which shows no sign of loosening its grip.”[xvi]

For Rothko, like for most American Jews, the Second World War was a moment of universal moral crisis. He had only become an American citizen in 1938 and Baal-Teshuva notes that: “Like many Jews, he was worried about the rise of the Nazis in Germany and the possibility of a revival of anti-Semitism in America, and U.S. Citizenship came to signify security.” American entry into the war was exactly what Rothko wanted, claiming that it represented “an escape from narrow-minded isolation, a reconnection with the destinies of modern history.” Schama observes that
now Rothko and his painter friends – so many of them originally European Jews – wanted American art to go the same way. With European civilization annihilated by fascism, it was up to the United States to take the torch and save human culture from a new Dark Ages. It was not just a matter of offering safe haven to the likes of Piet Mondrian or [Picasso’s] Guernica, but rather the authentic American way – doing something bold and fresh, taking the fight to the enemy which had classified modernism as “degenerate” and had done its best to destroy its partisans. … The Nazis had art (as well as everything else) entirely the wrong way round. The modernism they demonized as “degenerate” was in fact the seed of new growth, and what they glorified as “regenerate” was the stale leavings of neo-classicism. Their mistake was America’s – and particularly New York’s – good fortune [!].[xvii]
This was a time when many American Jews were modifying their names to sound less Jewish. In January 1940 Marcus Rothkowitz became Mark Rothko. During the war years Rothko’s art changed too as he produced a series of surrealistic pictures inspired by Freud’s interpretations of dreams, C.G. Jung’s theories of the collective unconscious, and ancient Greek mythology. Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy was an important influence at this time.[xviii]

Towards the end of 1943, all of the ethnic networking finally began to bear tangible fruit for Rothko. He befriended Peggy Guggenheim, “the most voracious patroness of American avant-garde art”, who had migrated to New York in 1941. Guggenheim’s artistic consultant, Howard Putzel, “convinced her to show Rothko in her Art of This Century gallery, where she had opened in 1942, during the low point of the war.”[xix] In January 1945, Guggenheim decided to put on Rothko’s first one-man exhibition at her gallery.[xx] In 1948 Rothko invited a coterie of mainly Jewish friends and acquaintances to view his new ‘multiforms’. The art critic and historian Harold Rosenberg “remembers finding these works “fantastic,” and called his experience “the most impressive visit to an artist” in his life.”[xxi] Dempsey notes that “both the critics and the artists themselves gave the works heroic, noble interpretations.”[xxii]


Untitled (1947) – “Multiform” by Mark Rothko

Rothko’s financial situation improved significantly in the early 1950s, by which time he had arrived at the style that defined his art until his death in 1970. The highly successful Jewish art dealer Sidney Janis signed up Rothko in 1954 and showed 12 of his works at his gallery in 1955. According to Baal-Teshuva, “this settled Rothko’s status as a protagonist of international importance in the postwar art scene.” This is ascribed to the fact that “Sidney Janis marketed Rothko’s paintings much more effectively. … and even during the recession of 1958 he was able to sell 13 paintings for more than 20 thousand dollars”—likely to other Jews. After this, Rothko’s art was declared a good investment by Fortune magazine, which led to his relationship with his now resentful colleagues Clifford Still and Barnet Newman deteriorating to the point where “they accused Rothko of harbouring an unhealthy yearning for a bourgeois existence, and finally stamped him as a traitor.”[xxiii]


Untitled (1956) By Mark Rothko

In 1958 Rothko received a contract to paint murals for the Four Seasons restaurant in the Seagram’s Building in New York. The man who approved the commission was Seagram’s American subsidiary head Edgar Bronfman Sr – who was to become President of the World Jewish Congress in 1981. The fee offered was $35,000 (a huge sum at the time). Rothko was, however, uncomfortable with the commission and the damage it might do to his bohemian reputation. Later he returned the money and asked for the completed murals to be returned. Nine of the “Seagram Murals” were permanently installed in a room at London’s prestigious Tate Gallery in 1970. These paintings are widely considered to be Rothko’s greatest achievement.


Three of the Rothko’s Seagram’s Murals at the Tate Modern

Opinions vary widely about Rothko’s work and legacy. While many within the Jewish-dominated art establishment hail him as a genius, others cannot believe that any sane person would pay tens of millions of dollars for what amounts to nothing more than a large, empty canvas occupied by two colors divided into separate rectangles by a third color. What is clear, however, is that Rothko’s career and posthumous reputation as an artistic giant have been, to a very great extent, the result of hyping on the part of the Jewish cultural establishment. Jewish role models play a very important role in fostering Jewish pride and group cohesion, and it has been a standard feature of Jewish intellectual life to actively construct Jewish geniuses by wildly exaggerating the artistic or intellectual significance of their work. This ethnocentric Jewish self-puffery is an important way to shape social categorization processes in a way that benefits Jews in two ways: by undermining traditional notions of the importance of painterly ability as a bedrock of the traditional culture of the West; and by undermining specific schools of art, such as Thomas Hart Benton and the Regionalists, that promoted positive and uplifting images of America for popular and elite consumption. This places Rothko firmly in the culture of the left that has been vastly predominant among Jewish intellectuals at least since the beginning of the 2oth century. Mark Rothko stands out as an egregious example of a figure who has been utilized by Jewish art critics and historians for these purposes.

Go to Part 3.

REFERENCES

Baal-Teshuva, J. (2009) Rothko, Taschen, Cologne, Germany.

Collings, M. (1999) This is Modern Art, Weidenfeld & Nicholson, London.

MacDonald, K. B. (1998/2001) The Culture of Critique: An Evolutionary Analysis of Jewish Involvement in Twentieth‑Century Intellectual and Political Movements, Westport, CT: Praeger. Revised Paperback edition, 2001, Bloomington, IN: 1stbooks Library.

Schama, S. (2006) Simon Schama’s Power of Art, BBC Books, Great Britain.

Schama, S. (2006a) Simon Schama’s Power of Art, BBC TV Series, Great Britain. View at:

Scruton, R. (2005) Modern Culture, Continuum, London.

Scruton, R. (2007) Culture Counts – Faith and Feeling in a World Besieged, Encounter Books, New York.

ENDNOTES
[i] Baal-Teshuva, p. 10

[ii] Schama 2006, p. 403

[iii] Ibid.

[iv] In MacDonald, p. 217

[v] Schama 2006a

[vi] Baal-Teshuva, p 24

[vii] Collings, p. 169

[viii] Scruton 2007, p. 89

[ix] Baal-Teshuva, p. 26

[x] Schama 2006, p. 405

[xi] Baal-Teshuva, p. 26

[xii] Schama 2006a

[xiii] In MacDonald, p. 217

[xiv] Ibid. p. 218

[xv] Schama 2006, p. 406

[xvi] Scruton 2007, p. 87

[xvii] Schama 2006, pp. 408 & 411-412

[xviii] Baal-Teshuva, p. 33

[xix] Ibid. p. 38

[xx] Ibid. p. 39

[xxi] Ibid. p. 45

[xxii] Dempsey, p. 190

[xxiii] Baal-Teshuva, p. 50

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Old November 23rd, 2012 #4
Pat Bateman
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Default The Plot Against Art

The Plot Against Art
By Lasha Darkmoon


I’ll begin with a confession: I am a failed artist. Ever since I can remember, I have wanted to paint. The only thing that stopped me was lack of talent. The first time I did a self-portrait, checking with the mirror in my bedroom to see how I was getting on, my mother put an abrupt end to my artistic ambitions by exclaiming, “Gosh, what a cute little chimp!”

It was a rude awakening for a nine-year-old artist.

About a decade later, I asked myself was art was all about. One day I found this sentence in a biography of Burne-Jones, and I jotted it down in my diary and pondered it for a day or two, “I mean by a picture a beautiful romantic dream of something that never was, never will be — in a better light than any light that ever shone — in a land no one can define or remember, only desire — and from forms divinely beautiful.”


Waterhouse, The Lady of Shalott, 1888. Art as it used to be, when painters knew how to paint. This would now be considered kitsch.

When I read that sentence, I almost fainted. I was a sensitive girl, given to fits of swooning at the slightest opportunity. It was then I realized there was no real difference between poetry and painting, between painting and music. All, in their own ways, sought for God — albeit a God who might not exist — but a God nonetheless. God was beauty. God was longing. God was the fire in the rose.

That’s what I thought then. I was young and foolish.

Art, I found out later, was about making money. Organized Jewry taught me this. Art dealer Paul Rosenberg says, “A painting is only beautiful when it sells.” Jewish president of the Marlborough Gallery, Frank Lloyd, confirms this: “There is only one measure of success in running a gallery: making money.”

The question we need to ask is: Who runs the Art Market and how did it become a freak circus?

Art Should Make You Miserable

Let’s take a little trip round the art world with Israel Shamir. Mr Shamir, after all, is not only well-informed about art but is also a tour guide in Jerusalem. He agrees with me about the sacral nature of art. “No art without Christ,” he says. By “Christ” he means much more than the historical Jesus. He means the Logos, or Christ Principle, the rule of law in a divinely ordered universe.

Since Darwin and Freud, there has been a complete “revaluation of all values.” Everything has been turned upside down. We can mostly attribute this parlous state of affairs to the machinations of organized Jewry, in particular to a group of revolutionary thinkers known as the Frankfurt School. (For a detailed introduction to the ideas of these neo-Freudian Marxists, most of whom were Jewish refugees from Hitler’s Germany who fled to America, see Chapter 5 (http://www.kevinmacdonald.net/chap5.pdf) of Kevin MacDonald’s The Culture of Critique).

Just as one of these Frankfurters, Theodor Adorno, set out to destroy Western music, assuring the world that atonal music was a good thing because it was discordant and ugly, others in the group set out to destroy art and push it to its reductio ad absurdum: lights going on and off in an empty room, unmade beds with condoms and bloodstained panties strewn around, and sealed cans containing the artist’s own excrement.


Tracey Emin's My Bed


Piero Manzoni's Artist's Shit

One of the founders of the Frankfurt School, Georg Lukács, asked rhetorically, “Who will save us from Western civilization?” He began the rescue operation himself, convincing himself that the best way to do this was to create “a culture of pessimism” and “a world that has been abandoned by God.” Cool.

Another of these mental giants, Walter Benjamin, believed that the purpose of art was to make people as miserable as possible, for pessimism was an essential preliminary to world revolution. “To organize pessimism,” he pointed out portentously, “means nothing other than to expel the moral metaphor from politics.” Benjamin succeeded only too well in making himself miserable. He committed suicide.

Marxist revolutionary Willi Munzenberg made no bones about his mission in life. It was to destroy Western civilization. No kidding. To accomplish this, he said, the Frankfurters would have to “organize the intellectuals and use them to make Western civilization stink. Only then, after they have corrupted all its values and made life impossible, can we impose the dictatorship of the proletariat”.

To summarize: Let’s create a culture of pessimism. Let’s make Western civilization stink. Let’s create a godless world and drive people to despair. Let’s corrupt society’s values and make life impossible. In short, let’s create hell on earth.

It will soon become clear to you, if you are a struggling artist, that the art world is dominated by Jews who are only too anxious to bring about this hell on earth. Their control over what now passes for art is as tentacular as it is terrifying. Art has morphed into Anti-Art. “For Jews,” Israel Shamir points out, “their group interest lies in undermining visual art, for they can’t compete with it. Even deeper group interest is to undermine Christianity, their main enemy.”

To undermine. To corrupt. To create discord. To drive crazy. To destroy. Verbs to remember. Let’s begin our tour of the art world, with Israel Shamir as our guide, and try to gain an insight into what is going on.

Gallery Hopping With Mr Shamir

One day, Shamir finds himself in the Basque capital of Bilbao in Spain. He has come to check out the museum of modern art built by the fabulously rich (Jewish) Guggenheim family. The biggest building in Spain, the Guggenheim Museum impresses Shamir profoundly — it’s like something out of a science-fiction movie — but once he steps inside the building he is acutely disappointed.

Hey, what on earth is all this junk? Pieces of corrugated iron lying around like in a scrap yard. Rusty iron plates in one corner. Video screens blinking away inanely. Bare geometric forms. And, believe it or not, an entire floor devoted to a collection of Armani suits. Boy, I’m outa here! Shamir mutters to himself, making a beeline for the Exit.

And what does he do next? He hops on a plane to Venice, and now we see him poking around the famous Biennale Museum, trying to make sense out of a collection of trashed cars on display. Mopping his brow feverishly, he needs to sit down to collect his wits. No, don’t sit there, sir — those chairs are a precious work of art! You want to read a good book, Mr Shamir, to take your mind of all this junk? No problem. Here’s a bookcase full of books. Help yourself. Or rather, don’t help yourself! This bookcase, crammed with moldy old books, is also a sublime work of art! Yes, all the way from sublime, artistic Israel!

One might have thought that, after suffering all these disappointments, Mr Shamir would have packed it in and gone back to Jaffa, determined never to set foot in an art gallery again. But no, a glutton for punishment, our art guide now decides to visit a museum in Amsterdam where he is confronted by a collection of decomposed pig trunks. To his astonishment, he learns that a cadaver immersed in formaldehyde, on display in this same museum, has been purchased for $50,000 by a rich American. Wow, a corpse collector!

His disillusionment is total when, on visiting Copenhagen, he finds himself in the church of St Nicholas. Being a convert to Christianity, maybe he goes in there to pray. If so, he is saddened to have his mind polluted by the pictures he sees on the walls of that venerable old church. Here’s a color photograph of a naked old woman, withered and sick. And here, right next to it, is a huge blown-up picture of the female genitalia. And what’s this? Oh, nothing to worry about! Just a photo of a couple of guys having oral sex. Hey man, c’mon! This is a healthy and natural act! What better place for the celebration of joyous pagan sexuality than a Christian church?

“Whatever they proclaimed as art, was art,” Shamir concludes ruefully. “In the beginning, these were works of some dubious value like the ‘abstract paintings’ of Jackson Pollock. Eventually we came to rotten swine, corrugated iron, and Armani suits. Art was destroyed.”

The Jewish Connection

So what does all this have to do with the Jews? Plenty. If you want to play that fascinating game known as Cherchez le Juif, let’s continue our tour of the contemporary art world.

You will meet many artists, quite a few of them pliant and accommodating non-Jews, who are prepared to jump through the hoops set before them by their Masters: the ubiquitous Jews lurking in the shadows. The men who call the shots. The men with the money. The men whom the artist must learn to please and flatter if he hopes to get ahead and become rich and famous.

The ambitious artist will find himself drawn inevitably into a Jewish world. He will learn to pepper his conversation with Yiddish phrases. He will never breathe a word of criticism against Israel, no matter what atrocities that country is in the process of committing. He will sneer at Muslims, the Qur’an and the Palestinians. He will find it pays dividends to insult Christianity, the religion of his forefathers. He will mention the Holocaust, whenever possible, with moist eyes; and he will paint as many pictures of Auschwitz as he can, preferably with chimneys belching black smoke.

All this has been done by goy artists. The proof for these claims can be found here in this enormous archive of art information. I have drawn upon it heavily.

Even the great Picasso knew he was appeasing the Jews when he embraced his friend Pierre Daix and confided in a low voice, “To think that painters once thought they could paint The Massacre of the Innocents!” He was clearly echoing or anticipating Adorno’s “There can be no poetry after Auschwitz.” If there can be no poetry after Auschwitz, there can be no art either — certainly not Christian art.

Andy Warhol knew better than most how to ingratiate himself with the Jews. His 1980 series, “Ten Portraits of Jews of the Twentieth Century," features ten portraits of what Warhol referred to as "Jewish geniuses," one of whom was Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir — the “genius” who said there were no Palestinians, adding with her famous flair for the witty phrase: “How can we return the occupied territories? There is nobody to return them to.” Another "genius" was Sigmund Freud, whom Kevin MacDonald has described as having perpetrated the greatest scientific fraud of the 20th century — a fraud that was very useful in constructing the culture of Western suicide.



Warhol's portraits of Gold Meir and Sigmund Freud, from his Ten Portraits of Jews of the Twentieth Century series

Warhol seems to have put his considerable charm to work with Henry Geldzahler, curator of the Metropolitan Museum of Art — an influential Jew who happened, like Warhol, to be homosexual. “Although they were never lovers, the relationship became intimate,” we are assured by one of Warhol’s biographers. “Andy spoke to Henry on the phone every night before he went to sleep and every morning as soon as he woke up.” I am not saying that Warhol and Geldzahler were lovers, though others have said so. That’s of no interest to me. All I’m suggesting is that Warhol, a notorious opportunist, found it helped his career to cultivate the Jews. His appeal, in the words of film critic Carrie Rickey, was to the “synagogue circuit.”

Transvestite potter Grayson Perry — here he is receiving the Turner Prize for his inspired pots — knew his success depended less on his talents than on the advertising genius of his plutocratic patron Charles Saatchi. He was well aware, moreover, that Islamophobia can always be relied on to win friends and influence people in the Judeocentric art world. “The reason I haven’t gone all out to attack Islamism in my art,” he confides fearlessly, “is because I feel real fear that someone will slit my throat.” Avoiding controversial political statements in the interests of discretion, Perry decided to devote his life to producing ceramic pots depicting “explicit scenes of sexual perversion.” It must have been a tough decision.


The potter wore bobbysox ... Grayson Perry poses with his wife Phillippa and daughter Flo after winning the Turner Prize.

Non-Jewish artists such as Anselm Kiefer, Christian Boltanski and Christopher Williams have been almost as prolific in their production of Holocaust paintings as Jewish painter RB Kitaj, a man whose obsession with Auschwitz has often been noted. “The chimney in a Kitaj painting,” art pundit Juliet Steyn informs us, “functions as an indictment on Christianity.” Translation: After Auschwitz, who needs Golgotha?

As for Andres Serrano with his Piss Christ and Chris Ofili with his dung-bedecked Holy Virgin Mary — the Madonna surrounded by pictures of the female genitals cut from pornographic magazines — both these emotionally immature artists were clearly aware that contempt for Christ and his mother is often pleasing to the Jews.


Chris Ofili's Holy Virgin Mary and Andres Serrano's Piss Christ

Artists? These men are more like circus dogs, trained to jump through hoops and beg for bones from their masters. It’s the men with the money, the Saatchis and the Guggenheims, who crack the whip.
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Old November 23rd, 2012 #5
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Default The Plot Against Art

Part Two

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.”


Riki R. Nelson, Girl in a Box, Girl in Cherry Silk, from the Saatchi Gallery, London
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 (http://www.jewishtribalreview.org/26art.htm). 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”.


Interior of Everyone I have ever Slept With, 1963–1995, an iconic work by Tracey Emin, owned by Charles Saatchi until being destroyed in a fire.


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.

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

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.
--

http://www.theoccidentalobserver.net...moon-ArtI.html
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Old November 23rd, 2012 #6
Zenos
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This pic shows exactly how fake the art world has become. The jew is laughing behind the scenes, that woman is standing there "appreciating" the paintings, trying to make sense of them, when her common sense tells her it's all crap. So art admirers are as fake as the pieces they admire. There's a good rule to go by, if art needs to be explained then it isn't art.

The jew knows it's crap, only the goyim try to convince themselves it's fine art to fit in and be a part of the art community. Art isn't about talent anymore.

I went to several art museums that featured this type of junk and asked for refunds, and got it, and I felt good when I told them why. There's still some good pieces in the museums, but they're hard to find sometimes.
 
Old November 23rd, 2012 #7
Steven L. Akins
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Pat Bateman View Post
A general rule regarding art:

If it takes 4 jews to explain what you're looking at - you're looking at shit.




$75 Million Rothko Leads Sotheby's Record-Setting Sale
By Kelly Crow

Sotheby's sold a Mark Rothko abstract for $75 million on Tuesday in a contemporary-art auction whose total—$375 million—surpassed any in its company history.


This Mark Rothko abstract sold for $75 million Fittingly, the Rothko painting is titled, "No. 1 (Royal Red & Blue)."
That crap isn't art, it is a waste of paint and canvas.

This is true art (by Maxfield Parrish):















 
Old November 23rd, 2012 #8
brutus
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Let's call abstract art what it really is, twisted reality presented by twisted people. The so-called art perveyed by jews is an insider joke. They spin yarns and outright lies as they describe their trash to gullible goyem who fork over astronomical sums for paintings produced by mental defectives with no more talent than if they were made by preschoolers in a daycare.

The lofty prices supposedly to be paid for this junk is nothing more than hype. No money ever passes hands from one jew to another as the public is led to believe. Only when a nonjew buys a painting from a jew does money get paid. And this leaves the nonjew with a mulitmillion dollar piece of shit hanging on his wall that no one will ever buy back from him. Only when the nonjew dies and a jew can snap up the painting for peanuts at an estate sale does the phony bidding-up and hype start all over again as the jew looks for another nonjew to fleece.

Can you hear the jew snickering?

.
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Old November 23rd, 2012 #9
ernst blofeld
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I watched the movie Pollock recently with Ed Harris as the no talent
falling down drunk Jackson Pollock.
Everyone shown to be instrumental in advancing his "art" was a jew:
art critic Clement Greenberg, art collector Peggy Guggenheim, and his pushy jew wife Lee Krasner.
The man was an all around vile human being.
His friend, the painter DeKooning, used to have his wife sleep with Greenberg to
keep the good reviews coming.
A noteworthy book that tells the story of the jewish racket known as abstract expressionism is Tom Wolfe's The Painted Word.
 
Old November 23rd, 2012 #10
Steven L. Akins
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Quote:
Originally Posted by brutus View Post
Let's call abstract art what it really is, twisted reality presented by twisted people. The so-called art perveyed by jews is an insider joke. They spin yarns and outright lies as they describe their trash to gullible goyem who fork over astronomical sums for paintings produced by mental defectives with no more talent than if they were made by preschoolers in a daycare.

The lofty prices supposedly to be paid for this junk is nothing more than hype. No money ever passes hands from one jew to another as the public is led to believe. Only when a nonjew buys a painting from a jew does money get paid. And this leaves the nonjew with a mulitmillion dollar piece of shit hanging on his wall that no one will ever buy back from him. Only when the nonjew dies and a jew can snap up the painting for peanuts at an estate sale does the phony bidding-up and hype start all over again as the jew looks for another nonjew to fleece.

Can you hear the jew snickering?

.
No doubt the Jews are also behind haute couture fashions and haute cuisine cooking:

 
Old November 23rd, 2012 #11
Olesia Rhoswen
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Hahaha... I just had a thought- have these characters ever sued anyone for copying their work? That would be the greatest laugh of all.
 
Old November 23rd, 2012 #12
Hunter Morrow
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Art is yet one more deskilled kike racket. The very first thing mentioned in this article is a price tag. The most impressive, nay, the only impressive thing about this "painting" is the price tag.

Quote:
The sale of the 1954 Rothko—with its floating red, pink and blue rectangles—pushed the auction house's sale total over the $362 million it got from a similar evening sale in May 2008 that marked the peak of the last market cycle.
Great. Art as commodity. Art with "market" cycles like orange juice and pork belly futures.

Quote:
It's unclear whether Tuesday's performance amounts to a similar cresting, but in the short term it could boost collectors' confidence in art values—especially after last week's disappointing sales of Impressionist and modern art.
Again, back to the market concerns. The article said 10, 15 words about Rothko's "importance" and then got right back to what is truly important: $$$$
Art as scam. Art as verbal trickery. Art as another thing in a portfolio like municipal bonds. Nothing means anything to Jews apart from the price tag which is why they make meaningless drivel and attach an eye-popping shekel figure to it. It is how a "Rothko" is a very special thing but if a Hunter Morrow did it in 2 hours you couldn't give it away. Again, art as investment. Art as name brand.

Edit: The new hot thing in art is to be even worse than a Rothko or a DuChamp or a Serrano. It is to make completely inexplicable, nigh unexplainable "object art" and to get college universities and "art museums" to finance it. Physical trash plus tenure=big bucks.

Another thing to note? The hip kike thing nowadays is for an artist to completely eschew even the smallest of physical labor on his or her part and to hire armies of "dwarves" and "elves" to do the work. Goyim, presumably. It went from just culture debasement and inversion of the morals to slave labor. I shudder to think what the next great evolutionary leap will be.

Long, but worth it! This is the 21st Century update to Thomas Wolfe's brilliant The Painted Word...


Last edited by Hunter Morrow; November 23rd, 2012 at 09:15 PM.
 
Old November 24th, 2012 #13
Hunter Morrow
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Jewish high class music (before they decided to push rap and make contemporary country music rap with banjos) backed up with Jewish "art"


Hitler was right...AGAIN! This stuff really is just degenerate trash and shows the true garbage inner self of kikes.

"“Anyone who sees and paints a sky green and fields blue ought to be sterilized.”
 
Old November 27th, 2012 #14
N.B. Forrest
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No-talent kikes promoting no-talent kikes. "You scratch my back, bubbe, and I'll scratch yours. Oy, we'll bullshit the goyeem and make a fortune!"

The usurpation of the White art world by these filthy tapirs - the enormously profitable hyping of trash slapped together by jew hacks, and the ignoring of true White modern artists like the Regionalists - is particularly blood-boiling.

Their ill-gotten millions should be confiscated, and they should all be burned to death on Rothko pyres.
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Old November 27th, 2012 #15
The Bobster
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Quote:
“Anyone who sees and paints a sky green and fields blue ought to be sterilized.”
Maybe they hung the painting upside down.
 
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