comments are closed on this review, click here for worldwidereview home
From: blp
Category: Exhibitions
Date: 19 December 2004
Darlings, I take your points, but it's you who are confused. Serota did not compare the newspapers schadenfreude to genocide, he made the link between two different incidents of culture being burned and a great many members of the public and media approving of it. The Nazis were worse because they did it on purpose, but the newspapers and, worse, the people who wrote to the newspapers snickering about the MOMART fire showed a similar intolerance and contempt for the cultural expressions of others, often based on a similar defense of opposing elitism to the ones that had currency in post Weimar Germany. I only read the Guardian, but Guardian readers came off pretty badly in this. I'm not a huge fan of a lot of the art that was destroyed, but I was truly disgusted by the people who thought it was funny. Voltaire is surely still the best guideline for this kind of thing: 'I may not agree with what you say, but I would defend to the death your right to say it.'
comments are closed on this review, click here for worldwidereview home