When Victims Rule (pdf)

MODERN ART
psychic preoccupation with memorializing himself and notable public
figures with which he has socialized. Frankly, it’s one more befitting a
newly moneyed, 18th-century Dutch burgher than a discerning, visionary
collector seeking emerging and mid-career artists’ best and most enduring
works.” [VANESIAN, K., 6-7-01]
Other intriguing Jewish art angles these days include the New York Jewish
Museum (which gave Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns their first important
exhibitions) where “a high tech highlight of the galleries devoted to the Israelite
period [is] the interpretive Talmud – a video that displays Talmudic
passages with inset translations and talking heads.” [ROSENBAUM, p. 102]
Elsewhere, “last summer,” noted ARTnews in 1994, “Jane Alexander [a Gentile]
was starring on Broadway, playing a Jewish banker in The Sisters Rosensweig. No
one, least of all the actress herself, imagined that she’d soon take on what may
be her most challenging role yet – leader of the embattled National Endowment
for the Arts.” [CEMBELAST, p. 71-72] In Eastern Europe, with the collapse of
communism, Jewish-American billionaire George Soros has “introduced artists
to new systems of patronage, exhibitions, and competition” with the Soros
Center for Contemporary Arts in Prague, one of 20 Soros-established organizations
throughout former communist countries. [BERNSTEIN, R]
One of the things the Eastern Europeans can learn is that in the relatively
narrow art world circle, “there is a constant movement of people around the
jobs of the art world, from college professor to museum director to dealer to
magazine editor.” [BURNHAM, p. 125] All such occupations tend to
overlap. Nepotism and interconnectedness run rampant. Prominent dealer
Ivan Karp, for instance, started out as an art critic for the Village Voice. He later
worked for art dealer Leo Castelli before starting his own gallery, O.K. Harris.
Castelli’s ex-wife Ileana (Sonnabend) started her own eventually important gallery
too. Artist Alexander Lieberman started out as a layout editor at Vogue. His
stepdaughter became a contributing editor for Art in America and was married
to another artist, Cleve Gray, who showed at the same gallery as Lieberman, and
was also a contributing editor to Art in America, as well as a sometimes writer
for Vogue. “Those who questioned Liberman’s art,” notes Thomas Meir, “invariably
mentioned his status as editorial director at Conde Nast,” the firm
owned by billionaire media magnate Si Newhouse, of whom Liberman has
been a close friend for thirty years. [MAIER, p. 70] “Poverty is not conducive to
good art,” Liberman told the New York Times in a feature about his studio, “and
I have always believed in living life to the hilt.” [MAIER, p. 70] Prominent art
critic Clement Greenberg was both an associate editor of the Jewish magazine
Commentary and art critic for the Nation.
Such “cross-pollinating” may be witnessed in the recent case of Tom L.
Freudenheim who, at the same time, has been an executive at the National Endowment
for the Arts, Assistant Secretary for the Arts and Humanities at the
Smithsonian Museum, and Board Vice-Chairman of the National Foundation
for Jewish Culture. Henry Geldzahler was “curator of twentieth century art at
the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, program director for the
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