Mirroring Evil: Auschwitz, Art and the “War on Terror”

Abstract

Two provocative statements: Adorno’s damning 1966 judgment, condensing two decades of sustained reflection on the implications of Auschwitz for critical theory and the ethics of aesthetic representation; and Finkelstein’s excoriating indictment of Jewish instrumentalization of the Nazi genocide at the end of the century. The confrontation of the first by the second—the painful exposure, that is, of a now dominant ethic of representation to a historical context much changed from that of its origin—would approximate the controversy ignited by “Mirroring Evil: Nazi Imagery/Recent Art,” a 2002 exhibition at the Jewish Museum in New York. Including works by thirteen artists—some Jewish, all in their 30s and 40s, from America, Israel, Germany, Poland, France, Austria, and the United Kingdom—the exhibition was bitterly attacked for legitimizing art that treats the Jewish genocide with irreverence and insensitivity.¹ The first cries of protest began months before the exhibition opened. Holocaust survivors and regular supporters of the museum loudly expressed their pain and outrage, and a hundred protestors picketed the exhibition on the opening day. From then on until the close of the exhibition three and half months later, curator Norman Kleeblatt and the museum staff scrambled to limit and control the damage to the institution’s public image. The reception from the highbrow Manhattan press, usually quick to defend art from the philistines, was in this case notably sour.

After Auschwitz all culture, and urgent critique along with it, is garbage.

—Theodor W. Adorno

The Holocaust has proven to be an indispensable ideological weapon.

—Norman G. Finkelstein