“Artist” Turns Synagogue Into a Gas Chamber
Yes, this is the year 2006, and a Spanish “artist” has turned a German synagogue into a gas chamber:
An artist [sic] invited Germans to come and be symbolically gased with car exhaust fumes in a former synagogue.
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Santiago Sierra, a Spanish performance artist [sic], 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.
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Sierra, known internationally for his controversial [No! Really?] 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.
Note that it is a “former” synagogue because most of the Jews near Cologne were sent to real gas chambers almost 65 years ago.
The “artistic community” has gone from, “It’s OK for art to be provocative” to “Offensive is just a form of provocative, so it’s OK for art to be offensive,” to “If it’s not offensive, it’s not art,” to “If it’s offensive, it must be art” — unless, of course, it is offensive to Muslims. Can you imagine the reaction if a “performance artist” set up an exhibit in which European women were symbolically stoned for not having a long enough burka? It would be worse than the reaction to those cartoons.
Of course, if it were for any purpose other than “art” it would probably be illegal to concentrate carbon monoxide like that. Where are the Greens when you need them?
