Commentary:
New exhibition at the Jewish Museum in New York is a collection of art that combines Holocaust images with modern advertising symbols
March 26, 2002
NPR: Morning Edition

BOB EDWARDS: host:
The new exhibition at the Jewish museum in New York is a collection of art that combines Holocaust images with modern advertising symbols. Months before the exhibition opened, critics said it trivialized the Holocaust experience. Commentator Abe Novick says these works might have a greater lesson to teach.

ABE NOVICK:
Like me, all 13 of the artists in Mirroring Evil were born after the Holocaust. They're from the US, Europe and Israel. Four of them are Jewish. The exhibition's curator, Norman L. Kleeblatt, says they tried to create works in which the viewers would encounter the perpetrators face-to-face. It's certainly disturbing to see logos for Chanel, Hermes and Tiffany on cans of Zyklon-B, the gas used to kill millions of Jews. It's painful to look at the model Kate Moss and Calvin Klein ads interspersed with images of Nazi victims being stripped. Yet at the same time, the artworks have a tricky seductive quality.

In one piece, Alan Schechner has digitally inserted a picture of himself into a famous photograph taken at the Buchenwald concentration camp. He's holding a bright shiny can of Diet Coke. When I looked at that image, it was hard to believe what I was seeing. I found myself staring in amazement--partly at the manipulative audacity, partly at its ability to arouse deep emotions: sorrow mixed with refreshment? And because that work is on a computer screen, it invites interactivity. It draws viewers in. It makes us responsible by making us participants. And in the same way the protesters say the Mirroring Evil exhibition makes the Jewish museum an accomplice, they believe that the museum is glorifying Nazi imagery by exhibiting busts of Josef Mengele and that the artists who mix up the Holocaust with brand icons reduce it to nothing more than a concept to manipulate.

Maybe this exhibition risks distorting the Holocaust, but I think it's a risk worth taking. My generation still needs to answer the questions the Holocaust poses. It's interesting that Mirroring Evil has provoked such controversy when the hottest ticket on Broadway is "The Producers," a show that ridicules Nazis. Perhaps it's because in Mirroring Evil, there is no laughter to act as a release or because in a museum, there's no audience. We encounter the artworks individually.

And there's something familiar about those fake concentration camp ads. Our contemporary society is still healing from our own tragedy, and we have already created advertisements that refer to it. During the Super Bowl, Anheuser-Busch ran an ad showing its famous Clydesdales bowing on the sacred stretch of land known as ground zero. Alan Schechner's Diet Coke can made me wonder: Would we, could we ever leverage the Holocaust to sell a product? How far will a future generation of artists go, a generation even more removed from the 1940s? How will they exhume the ghosts of the Holocaust and of September 11th?

EDWARDS: Comments of Abe Novick, a senior vice president of corporate development for Eisner Communications, an advertising agency in Baltimore.