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Giuliani On Art,
Hitler On Art IIby Robert Lederman
robert.lederman@worldnet.att.net
February 21, 2001NY City's #1 art critic is at it again. Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, the noted adulterer who married his cousin, dumped his second wife on live television, parades about town with his mistress at taxpayer expense and violates the US Constitution as if doing so was a form of yoga now wants to create a decency task force to police the Big Apple's art museums.
NY Post 2/16/2001
ART-SICK RUDY WANTS
'DECENCY' TASK FORCE"A peeved Mayor Giuliani vowed yesterday to form a commission to set decency standards for taxpayer-funded cultural institutions after the Brooklyn Museum mounted another exhibit he deemed anti-Catholic. "I'm going to put together a group of people and call it a task force or a commission that can set decency standards for those institutions that are using your money - the taxpayers' money," the mayor said...Hizzoner called the photos "disgusting, outrageous." -
The latest piece of art to attract the Mayor's attention is called, Yo Mama's Last Supper, a photographic assemblage which depicts the disciples as robed Black men and Jesus as a nude Black woman. The work is clearly intended as a comment on race and gender rather than the Catholic Church since all Christians celebrate the Last Supper, an essentially Jewish event in which Jesus and his disciples celebrated Passover.
What's more, despite the nudity there's nothing either indecent or erotic about the piece. You can see almost as much flesh in the underwear ads in New York's mainstream newspapers and far more skin on HBO or in the average Hollywood movie. Need one mention that in thousands of works of art commissioned by the Catholic Church during the past 2,000 years Jesus, angels and various saints are depicted nude.
From his first days as NYC Mayor Giuliani has engaged in a relentless attack on artists and free speech. Street artists, protestors, topless dancers, political art that compared him to Hitler and even advertisements that gently poked fun at his reputation for taking credit for things he had little to do with have all felt the wrath of Giuliani. Having lost more than 23 Federal civil rights lawsuits over his novel interpretations of the First Amendment you might think he would have learned his lesson by now.
This Mayor's ideas on art have a striking similarity to those of another enemy of freedom, Adolf Hitler. Like Giuliani, Hitler was similarly obsessed with "decency".
Like Giuliani, Hitler went to great lengths to expose the public to the very art he was trying to censor. His 1937 Degenerate Art show of confiscated works of modern art, or Jewish Expressionism as Hitler called it, created a sensation exactly paralleled by Giuliani's efforts to censor art in NYC. Claims to be protecting the Catholic Church were for both men a convenient means of censoring political statements by their opponents, fomenting anti-Semitism and eliminating artistic freedom generally.
In both instances the issue had little to do with the art itself. One need not like a particular work to understand the principle that it is protected expression. In Giuliani's attempts to censor the Brooklyn Museum the irony is that he is attacking art made by Catholic artists under the premise that it is anti-Catholic.
The idea that it is outrageous to use public dollars to partly finance a museum that occasionally shows controversial art is comical coming from Mayor Giuliani. This is a married man whose mistress is protected by NYC detectives at a cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars a year.
Our Mayor proudly advertises the fact that he is spending billions of tax dollars to build baseball stadiums for billionaire friends like the Yankees George Steinbrenner. Nor is he shy about letting us know that he gave David Rockefeller 65 million dollars to renovate his families' art collection at the Museum of Modern Art - which shows art the Nazis stole from Jews during the Holocaust. To be properly appreciated, these unjustified expenses have to be viewed alongside New York City's' crumbling schools and hospitals, pothole ridden streets and widespread homelessness and hunger.
Based on the standards Giuliani hopes to set for art museums the works of Michelangelo, Rembrandt, Carravagio, and Shakespeare let alone countless modern artists would be considered indecent. The Bible itself, which contains descriptions of rape, incest, homosexuality and murder, would easily fall within the Mayor's concept of works that violate decency. Perhaps that's the idea after all.
As soon as he assumed power Hitler began attacking contemporary German art as morally decadent and as a misuse of public tax dollars. He seized art from both public museums and private art galleries, but rather than simply hiding the art he claimed to find so appalling, he went to great lengths to publicly display it, organizing huge art shows of Degenerate Art across Germany.
"The artist does not create for the artist: He creates for the people and we will see to it that henceforth the people will be called in to judge its art". -- Adolf Hitler
The notoriety of the painting of the Madonna by Chris Olfili and more recently of the Last Supper photograph by Renee Cox is entirely thanks to Giuliani's efforts. Both artists are Black - a group the Mayor has consistently focused his most repressive actions on. Like the contrived media coverage endlessly focusing on Black defendants and welfare recipients, these works have appeared on the covers of newspapers and magazines, on television news shows and are the main topic of discussion on radio talk shows and in opinion columns. In his own way the Mayor has sponsored a "degenerate art show" exactly paralleling Hitler's only this time featuring Black artists.
The expressionist art that was attacked, confiscated and destroyed by Adolf Hitler is in fact the very origin of the artistic sensibilities in the controversial Brooklyn Museum shows. It too was attacked based on the idea that it debased humanity, mocked religion and would, if allowed to continue, destroy public morality.
It might seem bizarre to those who see Mayor Giuliani as being close to elements in the conservative and orthodox Jewish community to suggest that his attack on the museum also reeks of anti-Semitism - unless one was present at the various demonstrations held by those offended by the Brooklyn Museum's Sensation exhibition in 1999. Having been there it would be impossible to ignore that this is one of the underlying messages of those who wanted the show closed.
As many of the anti-museum protesters loudly proclaimed, the Museum director, Arnold Lehman, the president of its board of trustees, Robert S. Rubin, and many of the members of its board of directors are Jewish. Critics of the show, including the Mayor, clearly enjoyed repeating for the media what they claimed to be the parallel analogy of dipping a Star of David in excrement to express their outrage about the depiction of the Virgin Mary with a breast made from elephant dung.
In an article in the 9/25/99 NY Times the Mayor actually called the Madonna a "national symbol", which is something even religious conservatives like Pat Robertson or NYC's Cardinal Egan would admit crosses the line between the separation of church and state.
Adolf Hitler, a man few today would consider to be in any way religious, frequently described himself as a Catholic ("I am now as before a Catholic and will always remain so"). A major thrust of his attack on Jewish art and artists in Germany was the idea that they were desecrating religious symbols and attempting to foster a degenerate view of mankind. Read these quotes on so-called Degenerate Jewish art by Hitler and the accompanying quotes by Mayor Giuliani and you will see that underlying this Giuliani-created controversy is the exact same anti-Semitic, anti-art and anti-freedom ideology.
The following quotes from Adolf Hitler, from contemporary German newspapers and magazines and from the actual catalogue of the Degenerate Art show staged by Hitler were found on a pro-Nazi website http://www4.stormfront.org/posterity/
If you want to really understand what the Nazis were about and why their ideology is still very much alive today and remains the driving force behind numerous contemporary social, scientific and political policies here in the U.S., there is no better source than this very extensive and profusely illustrated site. While Hitler is long dead the fact remains that thousands of Nazis were brought to the U.S. by our own government after the war and installed in the military, in industry, in research universities, in think tanks and in the intelligence and propaganda branches of the U.S. government.
President GW Bush's family spent a decade financing Hitler until in 1942 the US Congress seized many of their assets under the Trading with the Enemy Act. His father, former President Bush, was exposed in 1988 for having numerous former Nazis and Nazi sympathizers in his presidential campaign. Recent revelations about IBM helping Hitler to categorize the German population in preparation for the Holocaust provided the latest evidence of how central US corporations were to the Nazi effort.*
While it's undoubtedly a worn cliché to call a politician one disagrees with a Nazi or compare him to Hitler this comparison is not always undeserved. In this case, it is the explanation for much of what Mayor Giuliani has so far done, and what if ever allowed to go on to higher office, he and his associates intend to do.
"In July 1937 Hitler and Göbbels decided to clear museums of all remaining modern works and to mount an exhibition of modern works as an example of the most horrific art ever created. The custodians of all government and private museums and art collections are busy removing the most hideous creations of a degenerate humanity and of a pathological generation of so called artists" -- the magazine Der SA-Mann September 18th, 1937.
"How deeply the perverse Jewish spirit has penetrated German cultural life is shown in the frightening and horrifying forms of the Exhibition Of Degenerate Art in München ...This has nothing at all to do with the suppression of artistic freedom and modem progress.".-- Göbbels, November 26th, 1937, in Von der Gromacht zur Weltmacht.
"Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, still outraged over an exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum of Art that he calls perverted and anti-Catholic, broke into an impromptu philosophical discussion on Tuesday on the merits of civilization and sanitation. The Mayor, in fact, became so engaged in the topic that he incorrectly said the exhibition included "human excrement" on walls..."-NY Times, 10/13/99 Civilization, Sanitation and the Mayor
"It is not the function of art to wallow in dirt for dirt's sake, never its task to paint the state of decomposition, to draw cretins as the symbol of motherhood, to picture hunchbacked idiots as representatives of manly strength". -- Adolf Hitler speech at the Nazi Party Rally in Nuremberg in 1935.
"Mayor Giuliani yesterday left open the possibility that his office might begin screening art exhibits bankrolled by taxpayers. The closer scrutiny would come on a "case-by-case basis"...Giuliani's comments came a day after he warned he would slash money to any of 41 city-funded cultural institutions that presented works, which, in his view, aggressively attacked religion". -- Daily News 10/6/99 Mayor Hints at Art Exams Says city might do 'case-by-case screening of exhibits
"Freedom is not a concept in which people can do anything they want, be anything they can be. Freedom is about authority." Mayor Giuliani, New York Times, March 17, 1994
"Robert Lederman, 49, a street artist who has protested for years against Mayor Giuliani's policies, often arrives with dozens of placards caricaturing the mayor as Hitler, complete with the Fuhrer's mustache". -NY Times 4/8/2000 Demonstrators of Old Spread Their Message in a New Era of Protest
"I take a different view of someone comparing me to Adolf Hitler than when someone calls me a jerk." Mayor Giuliani, N.Y. Daily News 10/25/1998
"NEW YORK (AP) -- Former Mayor Ed Koch criticized Mayor Rudolph Giuliani on Wednesday for sharing a dais at a Martin Luther King Day event with an Austrian political leader who once praised the policies of Adolf Hitler. "Is that a place to celebrate Martin Luther King Day, to be on the same dais as the leader of the neo-Nazi Party in Austria?'' -AP 1/19/2000 Giuliani Criticized by Koch
Newsday 8/18/89 Holocaust `Reminder' Claimed "A concentration camp suvivor who witnessed the murders of his parents and five siblings at Auschwitz claimed that during questioning after his arrest on bribery charges he was placed before a blackboard bearing a Nazi slogan by former U.S. Attorney General Rudolph Giuliani's office as part of an attempt to "break" him...Written on the blackboard was the German phrase "Arbeit Macht Frei." The slogan, "Work Shall Set You Free," adopted by the Nazi party, appeared over the gates at Auschwitz."
To a Directory of Mr.Lederman's Essays
Robert Lederman is an artist, writer and activist and is also the President of the street artist advocacy group, A.R.T.I.S.T.
Click here for an archive of A.R.T.I.S.T. related news articles on the Freedom Forum websiteHis essays and Op-Eds have appeared in hundreds of alternative publications as well as the Daily News, Penthouse, Africa Sun Times, Street News and The Shadow.
Lederman was falsely arrested 41 times for his anti-Giuliani activities and was never convicted of any of the charges. As a result of the arrests, he's won four Federal lawsuits and overturned three laws.
He is best known for having created hundreds of paintings of Mayor Giuliani as a Hitler like dictator which were carried in demonstrations throughout the eight years of the Giuliani administration. Images of his paintings and articles about his arrests and lawsuits have appeared on all of the major television networks hundreds of times as well as frequently appearing in the NY Times, Daily News, NY Post, Newsday, Newsweek, People, The Washington Post, LA Times and NY Magazine.Robert Lederman,
President of A.R.T.I.S.T.
(Artists' Response To Illegal State Tactics)
robert.lederman@worldnet.att.net
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