Michael

From a review of "Mirroring Evil: Nazi Imagery/Recent Art" at the Jewish
Museum:

In the end, this show isn't so much about the Holocaust itself as about the art world recycling ancient cliches and obsessions and grafting them onto the Holocaust...Mr. Schechner's Diet Coke self-portrait [a photo of himself holding a can of Coke inserted into a photo of camp inmates] is yet another rant about the corrupting tyrannies of consumerism familiar since the days of Pop Art--50 years ago...For three decades or more, contemporary artists have turned their backs on art for art's sake in favor of a more activist agenda...artists saw their mission as addressing the world's social inequities: racism, sexism and almost every other "ism" you could think of. Yet a show like "Mirroring Evil" with its insider references to art and philosophy, is so ingrown, so inside baseball, that it demonstrates just the opposite: how out of touch contemporary art has become and thus how incapable it is of engaging the real world in any significant way.

Cheers,

Friedrich