Synopsis

Michael Kolonovsky interviewed Israeli author Ephraim Kishon for the magazine Focus . HEPHAISTOS obtained permission to reprint the interview. In metalwork, many of us are at the forefront of a conflict: Craftsmen gaze without comprehension on twisted iron rods and artists deny them any capacity for judgement -- Art is exalted above all -- Kishon says not!

Question:

Herr Kishon, in your new book you expose a "fundamentalist organization" by the name of Modern Art that has implemented a "brilliantly planned dumming down of the public. That's not just satire?

Kishon:

I always think satirically whether I want to or not but in this case I'm quite in earnest. One of the most successful commercial organizations in the world. I don't want to badmouth thse gifted scoundrelss excessively but several terrorist organizations operate in very much the same way.

Question:

Would you explain that further?

Kishon:

It's conceivable that I'm just envious, for we're looking at exceptionally bright jongleurs who have succeeded in turning a two-bit clown act into somthing very like a religion. The Art Mafia have chalked up an unequivocal victory over healthy human understanding and their impudence is gradually exceeding all bounds. On the other hand, human stupidity know no bounds either, so perhaps a healthy equlibrium is evolving...

Question:

You say that contemporary high art is garbage, you speak of "heavily subsidized lunatic asylums", "rubbish depots", "scrapheap openings", "daubs". But there are people who pay millions for it.

Kishon:

The Art Mafia have mounted a decades long brainwashing campaign with the effect that intelligent people, who in other domains are complete rational, lose there selfconfidence and say, "Maybe it's really art but I can't really say. I haven't the expertise." The proponents of the Modern are very clever pranksters. Indeed, many of them freely admit it when they get a bit drunk. The great sculptor Georg Baselitz once said, "What am I s'pose to do? The pay me a fortune for these things."

Question:

Why "Mafia"?

Kishon:

The mechanism. In all kindness, it resembles state terrorism in no small degree. Critical voices have all but vanished, galleries have gradually expunged all representational or comprehensible works. Today there is no longer a single art exhibition where you can see a normal work of art. They just hang scrap and daubs. If you want to gain recognition as a painter, want to earn some money or sit on a jury, you have to join up with the winners who make nauseatingly ugly and mindless stuff.

Question:

You wrote that Picasso could actually paint, that Warhol had at least made a good run at it, while Beuys couldn't be bothered with such a trivial pursuit right from the beginning...

Kishon:

The case of Beuys is probably unique in the history of art. He became a world famous artist without producing a single work of art. Apparently I am the only art historian who deosn't understand him. In a way, I admire him. He was a great humorist.

Question:

If the public is being snookered, how come no one has noticed?

Kishon:

They can't argue with religion. The people deify Modern Art and its prophet, the holy Picasso. They gaze at Beuys' bathtub and whisper, "That speaks to me; I don't know why but it excites me...."

Question:

And the critics?

Kishon:

Ah, the gurus. They write stuff that neither they they nor anyone else understands, as if their words had been run through a semantic meat grinder. Do you know, for example, what a "prefigured vibrational synthesis as optical distance to melodic hypertrophy" is? Or a "surface that fortifies itself against every intrusion of meaning"? [1] This kind of flaming idiocy quickly gets people into such acute embarassment that they soon come to believe that they're intellectual and spiritual morons. Go into any modern art show, and see the devout airheads creep around on tiptoe in radiant ecstacy and stand for a quarter of an hour in front of a single paint spatter. And no one laughs.

Question:

Lets unpack some of the popular objections to representational painting. First, photography has destroyed it by claiming the domain of representation for itself.

Kishon:

Nonsense! Did Dali paint like photography? Did Magritte? Or Hieronymous Bosch? Everything that isn't figurative is supposed to be wonderful? Even the old masters painted things that didn't exist. Jesus never sat for any of the artists that have painted Him. So long as people have two eyes, why should I paint them with three? It is perfectly clear that normal people think just as I do, only nobody has the nerve to open his mouth and say so.

Question:

Next: Adorno (for example) has asserted that, after the horrors of our century and in a commoditized [2] world, the idea of harmony can only be expressed in the nagative. Affirmative art is no longer possible. The world is rotten and beautiful art is but meretricious superficiality...

Kishon:

The world isn't worse than it ever was. Splendid paintings emerged during the Spanish Inquisition. And the abstractionists don't paint ugly things. they simply paint nothing at all.

Question:

What do you think about the war pictures by Dix or the caricatures of George Grosz?

Kishon:

How can you even mention them in this context? They were real artists! A drawing by Grosz has a clear social mission. But what social mission does a chair have on which you've smeared some lard? You can write pages about it but it remains a greasy chair.

Question:

Now the Kitsch allegation: If you reproduce old forms, you're making Kitsch

Kishon:

What's Kitsch? Everything that's agreeable to look at?

Question:

Perhaps the images for figurative painting are simply used up or worn out?

Kishon:

But the daubs and dribbles of the Abstract are alway fresh and new? Always new styles -- Constructivism, Suprematism, Minimalism -- and all of it equates to zero. How come, then, is a Raffael, a Rubens or a Toulouse-Lautrec so greatly valued?

Question:

That's a matter of viewpoint. Can it be that high art is dead along with metaphysics?

Kishon:

If so, then it was asassinated.

Question:

It may have been a natural death.

Kishon:

Medieval art is dead. Socialist Realism is dead. But beauty isn't bound to a political system. Today we have apartheid in high art. If the galleries would show half beautiful painting and half abstracts.... But no, they'll not tolerate a single real painter in their stables.

Question:

The greatest sin of Modern Art, you write, is contempt for the public. Isn't it what they deserve?

Kishon:

No. You can't say that a people deserves tyranny. It has crept in. People deserve a better art.

Question:

At the beginning of your book you write that the stuggle against the Art Mafia is lost. At the end you're agitating for the forthcoming revolution. How do you reconcile that?

Kishon:

With time. How invincible did Communism appear? And it's collapsed like a house of cards. One day the masses will cry, "We are the People. We want art!" Then the collapse will come. Then the megabuck rubbish will dissapear from the highbrow museums.

Question:

The parallel to the Nazi epoch doesn't disturb you?

Kishon:

Not at all. That the Nazis were against it doesn't sanctify Modern Art in any way. I can't forever construct my own standpoint in relation to the Nazis. I'm not going to take up smoking just because Adolph hated cigarrets.

Question:

In Andersen's tale, The Emperor's New Clothes, everyone laughed at the Emperor once the little kid had yelled, "Hey, the King is naked!" Does it annoy you that that somthing similar isn't happening with modern art?

Kishon:

It annoys me greatly. That's why I wrote the book. Modern art offends my intellect. So I'm trying to play the roll of the little kid.

Question:

Then doesn't it annoy you that your wife shows and sells abstract art in her gallery in Tel Aviv?

Kishon:

Married people don't need to have the same opinion about everything. My wife was against the book. She thinks I'm too extreme. I find modern art too extreme.

In his book, Picasso's Sweet Revenge...

Swelling tender structures with a narcissistically effervescent interplay of power.	Brown fleck in the lower left corner.
An Apollonian consummation of rhythmatized linear layers.	Two stripes.
Cosmically upthrusting cellular currents of timeless transfiguration.	Nothing.
Prefigured vibrational synthesis as optical distance to melodic hypertrophy.	Empty canvas, signed on the back.
Spiraloid, fluoric antagonisms of archetypical chimeric esotericism.	Five green triangles.
A luminous, foetal and autotaxic destruction coefficient immanent in the geometric, somnambulistic precognition of lambent erosions.	An inflated condom.

Notes

[1]

It was somthing of a challenge to translate the examples of Kunstblabla. But believe me, it reads much the same in the original.

[2]

verdinglichten: Commoditized? Materialistic?