When Victims Rule (pdf)

MODERN ART
baum] was reported to have reached a confidential settlement out of
court with six dealers to create a 690,000 pound fund to reimburse buyers
of between 300 and 500 Hine prints who were unhappy with their
purchases.” [TIMES OF LONDON, 8-17-01]
Prominent Jews in the photographic publishing field have included the
founders (William Ziff and Bernard Davis) of Popular Photography magazine,
the associate publisher of Modern Photography, the photo page editor of the
New York Times, the publisher of Photo Dealer magazine, the publisher of Photo
Weekly, and so on. [GILBERT, G., 1996, p. 306] Laura Levitt notes the increased
interest in the photographic publishing world in Jewish subjects:
“Since 1996 there has been a proliferation of exhibits on Jews and
photography across the United States … [There are also] explicit photographic
collections about Jews [that] are increasingly being marked as
identifactory texts. As I read it, this larger situation of loss [of the Jewish
past] helps account for the growing market for picture books about
American Jews.” [LEVITT, L., 2000, p. 90, 65]
Critic James Twitchell calls the omnipresent merger of modern art and business
advertising these days “adcult,” and the medium of photography plays a central
role. The photographic work of Richard Avedon is a case in point, reflecting
the interconnected back scratching of the art and corporate elite. Concerning an
Avedon exhibition at the Whitney Museum of Art, Twitchell notes that:
“Si Newhouse’s Advance Publications owns the New Yorker, which
gave Avedon more-than-usual space in the week of the show’s opening.
The co-publisher of the exhibition catalog, with an essay by New Yorker
art critic Adam Gopnik, is Random House, which is owned by Newhouse.
Among the six speakers at the Whitney symposium connected to
the show were Random House’s CEO Harold Evans and writers Brendan
Gil [author of a New York Review of Books article accusing the great
folklorist Joseph Campbell of anti-Semitism] and Ingrid Sischy who
write for … the New Yorker. The curator of the show was Jane Livingston
who does not work for the Whitney but for Avedon, who used a grant
from Kodak to pay for the show and the catalog. Synergies, anyone?”
[TWITCHELL, p. 227]
Elsewhere in the criss-cross into the art world, for years too Cornel Capa
(born Karol Friedman) has run the important International Center for Photography
in New York City. Capa’s brother, Robert Capa (Andreas Friedman), was
a founder of Magnum, the seminal photojournalism agency. Tom Freudenheim
notes that “many of the works [of a “Jewish art” exhibition under his review]
are by the most significant photographers of the century and indeed, it
can probably be demonstrated that this is a medium which, unlike painting and
sculpture, was moved primarily by men and women who were Jewish.”
[FREUDENHEIM, p. 28] “Photography has been dominated by Jewish photographers
from the 1920s through the 1980s,” says Tom Bamberger, himself both
a Jewish photographer and adjunct curator of a Milwaukee art museum.
[FREUDENHEIM, p. 28] Even the famous photography repository – the Bett-
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