27-03-2018, 18:58
Should we destroy art because it disturbs or threatens us?
Mear One is a serious artist. He's not a one-off tagger. All his work is political, threatening and at the very least challenging. It is deliberately full-on and right in your face.
Jeremy Corbyn has accidentally made him famous by something he said in in 2012.
The work in question certainly does employ tropes commonly seen as anti-semitic. It portrays bankers playing monopoly on the bowed heads of the "enslaved?". It certainly refers to the Bilderberg group and the conspiracy theory of the Jews taking control of Freemasonry. It contains a banner for New World Order. The bankers portrayed do resemble the Warburgs and Rothschilds. But then Jews were bankers .........
What the work actually portrays, other than the back of the dollar bill, is open to discussion. What it means, what is subject is, would be interpreted in different ways by different groups of people. I can see why people say it is antisemitic, though the artist denies it. Look at his other work and you will see this is a man keen to shock, who challenges all religion and portrays neither religion, nor god as things of beauty.
Even if we are offended by it, this is art. Should we destroy it because it hurts? Should we burn books? Should we silence dissent because it opposes our world view? Should we say and ask the hardest things in the world even if they make us hated?
Personally I'm not sure why an LA artist like Mear One was working in Brick Lane, but I think his work should still be there for us to be hurt, challenged and even offended by.
Though some of the images within this work are beloved of the far-right, that doesn't represent the politics of Mear One from what I can see. Maybe amidst all the flak he's taking, Jeremy Corbyn was right. Even if we hate a work of art, we learn nothing by destruction.
Mear One is a serious artist. He's not a one-off tagger. All his work is political, threatening and at the very least challenging. It is deliberately full-on and right in your face.
Jeremy Corbyn has accidentally made him famous by something he said in in 2012.
The work in question certainly does employ tropes commonly seen as anti-semitic. It portrays bankers playing monopoly on the bowed heads of the "enslaved?". It certainly refers to the Bilderberg group and the conspiracy theory of the Jews taking control of Freemasonry. It contains a banner for New World Order. The bankers portrayed do resemble the Warburgs and Rothschilds. But then Jews were bankers .........
What the work actually portrays, other than the back of the dollar bill, is open to discussion. What it means, what is subject is, would be interpreted in different ways by different groups of people. I can see why people say it is antisemitic, though the artist denies it. Look at his other work and you will see this is a man keen to shock, who challenges all religion and portrays neither religion, nor god as things of beauty.
Even if we are offended by it, this is art. Should we destroy it because it hurts? Should we burn books? Should we silence dissent because it opposes our world view? Should we say and ask the hardest things in the world even if they make us hated?
Personally I'm not sure why an LA artist like Mear One was working in Brick Lane, but I think his work should still be there for us to be hurt, challenged and even offended by.
Though some of the images within this work are beloved of the far-right, that doesn't represent the politics of Mear One from what I can see. Maybe amidst all the flak he's taking, Jeremy Corbyn was right. Even if we hate a work of art, we learn nothing by destruction.