1/19/2004: Swedish art provokes Israeli ambassador

[Undertoad]

The Israel's ambassador to Sweden was kicked out of Stockholm's Museum of National Antiquities after he attacked the above artwork.

It consists of blood-colored water, a sailboat called "Snow White" and an image of a woman suicide bomber who killed 21 people last October.

Of all the takes on this event, I like Agenda Bender's the best.

The museum's director was displeased unto even more comical exaggeration:

Museum director Kristian Berg suggested that Mazel endangered those in the museum. "He pulled out the plugs and threw one of the spotlights into the fountain, which caused the entire installation to short-circuit and made it totally life-threatening," Berg told Swedish news agency TT, AFP reported.

The ambassador's version:

I felt that I was standing in front of a horror, I felt that I was standing in front of an exhibit that, while it was in an historic and big museum in the heart of Europe, was glorifying genocide. I was standing before an exhibit calling for genocide, praising the genocide of me, you, my brothers and sisters. I pulled the plug on the three spotlights and plunged the exhibit into darkness. I think one of the spotlights fell into water.

This little event made the international news, but AB has it right: the real outrage here is that it's utterly crappy art.

The other artist, Feiler's Swedish wife Gunilla Skoeld Feiler, told daily Expressen that the work was "not a glorification of the suicide bomber."

"I wanted to show how incomprehensible it is that a mother-of-two, who is a lawyer no less, can do such a thing," she said.

"When I saw her picture in the paper, I thought she looked like Snow White, that's why I gave that name to the piece," she added.

That "sailboat = incomprehensible" metaphor is just nutty. It seems to me the wife/artist produced a provocative piece and then decided to lie about the intent of the work instead of defending it. Either that, or it's just plain bad art. Or both. Yeah, both.