This is sickening!

An artist invited Germans to come and be symbolically gased with car exhaust fumes in a former synagogue. Jewish leaders and media commentators say he is belittling the Holocaust and insulting its victims. But hundreds of people have lined up for the experience.

Santiago Sierra, a Spanish performance artist, pledged on Monday to hold talks with Jewish community leaders outraged by his project to give people a sense of the Holocaust by pumping lethal car exhaust fumes into a former synagogue and letting visitors enter one by one with a breathing apparatus.

Sierra, known internationally for his controversial work, led hoses from the exhaust pipes of six parked cars into the building in the town of Pulheim-Stommeln near Cologne to create lethal levels of carbon monoxide there.

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There has been damning criticism from the German media. The Kölnische Rundschau newspaper said Sierra's "art horror light" led to just the kind of trivialization Sierra claimed to be fighting. "What Santiago Sierra is doing in the Stommeln synagogue indeed takes your breath away, unless you're a visitor, in which case you get plenty of oxygen, take zero risks and are even caringly accompanied by a fireman," it wrote.

"That's quite a contrast with the countless victims of the death camps. How pretentious to seek to evoke their horror and fear of death in such a cheap way! In a cynical game which yields no insight whatsoever."

"At a time in which ever fewer authentic witnesses are alive to tell of the Nazi terror, we have to find serious and appropriate ways to give young people a sense of responsibility for the present and the future, without apportioning guilt," the paper said. "Sierra's work degrades history to a fictional spectacle and only does damage in this respect."

Thank God this is not taking place in America – your tax dollars would probably be paying for this “little synagogue of horrors” belittling of the Holocaust.

Posted by: Greg at 02:02 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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