A UM doc, a KKK guy and the Gaza-Israel Debate

By John Dorschner

      

         Cast of characters: a UM professor emeritus, a former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan,  a Norwegian doctor who defends the 9/11 Al-Qaeda attackers, a British medical journal, an Israeli health center and others, including a cameo appearance by Fidel Castro.

       The drama began two-plus months ago in the Lancet, a widely respected British medical journal, when five doctors and scientists submitted a letter decrying Israel's bombing of Gaza.

        That led to swirls of charges and counter-chargers, bringing to the fore two main issues – to what extent medicine should get involved in politics and how easy it is for opponents of Israeli military actions to find themselves embracing old-fashioned anti-Semites.

Murray Epstein

         The University of Miami connection is Murray Epstein, a nephrologist and professor emeritus of medicine who continues to lead clinical investigation studies in the United States and European Union. His role comes later in the story.

          The maelstrom began in July when the Lancet published An Open Letter for the People of Gaza, signed by five who said they spoke for 19 others. They lambasted “the ruthless assault” by Israel.

         “We are appalled by the military onslaught on civilians in Gaza under the guise of punishing terrorists,” the five wrote. “We as scientists and doctors cannot keep silent while this crime against humanity continues,” the authors said.

            The journal was bombarded by letters – pro and con. Two Italians wrote: “The renewed tragedy of the ongoing intolerable violation of the right to life and self-determination of Palestinian people by the Israeli troops must be stopped.”

           Many others shared the thoughts voiced in a letter by Bruce M. Marmor and Beverly A. Spirit: “It is totally inappropriate for a peer-reviewed medical journal to publish purely political, inaccurate, and prejudiced pieces... Where is the sympathy for the Israeli citizens who live under constant rocket attacks and invasions through tunnels that extend under kindergartens and people's homes by Hamas, whose charter calls for the destruction of Israel and the murder of Jews?"

           The debate was just getting started. Some angry doctors urged a boycott of Lancet. On Aug. 4, Lancet responded with an unsigned editorial, saying editors favored neither side, but "when one enters Gaza, it is as if one is entering a prison. … Debris lies everywhere.”

Lancet editor Horton

         The editorial defended printing the original letter: “Here is a war that is having far-reaching effects on the survival, health, and well being of Gaza's and Israel's civilian residents. It is surely the duty of doctors to have informed views, even strong views, about these matters; to give a voice to those who have no voice." 

        Critics shot back that the writers of the original letter were far from impartial. Most had strong connections to Palestine and some had received grants from pro-Arab anti-Israel groups.

            One of the authors, Mads Gilbert, a Norwegian doctor who worked extensively in Gaza, once told a Norwegian newspaper that America's enemies were justified in the 9/11 attacks because “if the U.S. government has a legitimate right to bomb and kill civilians in Iraq, the oppressed has a moral right to attack the U.S.”

            NGO Monitor, an Israel-based group, focused on two other authors, Paola Manduca and Swee Ang, publishing emails the pair sent to a Google group dubbed “Always Against the War.”

           The emails included a report that Egypt's new president was a secret Jew. Another repeated Fidel Castro's blasting the Israelis' attacks on Gaza. But the one that got the most attention was Manduca and Ang asking the group: "Please watch ... this video before it is removed from circulation.”

           The link went to a YouTube video entitled “CNN Goldman Sachs & the Zio Matrix,” which alleged that Jewish-dominated media was being unfair to Palestinians.

David Duke's video

The video was made by David Duke, a former Grand Wizard in the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan and the founder of the National Association for the Advancement of White People.

         Manduca and Ang said they had no idea who Duke was when they recommended his video, although Duke's name was widely publicized in Europe in 2013 when Italy kicked him out for trying to start an anti-Semitic neo-Nazi group. 

        The NGO Monitor report sparked stories in the Telegraph in London, the Jerusalem Post and other media. Duke himself happily entered the debate, supporting the authors of the Gaza letter: “The Jewish extremists are stunned by the bravery of these medical professionals” to speak out against Israelis who believe they have a “God-ordained right to murder the hated Goyim,” Duke wrote on his website.

David Duke

       Duke, who has run for president, has been credited in some media reports as having put a modern face on white supremacy, exchanging white hoods for business suits. He has said his movement wasn't “anti-black” but “pro-white” and “pro-Christian.”

        Indeed, the homepage of davidduke.com has no diatribes against blacks, focusing instead exclusively on Jews. One Duke report: “Horrors of ISIS Created by Zionist Supremacy.”

        While these storms were raging, Epstein in Miami was among the many trying to figure out to respond. Like many Jews, he was upset by the intrusion of a medical journal into politics, particularly since the Gaza letter made no mention of Hamas and its attacks on Israel.

       One of Epstein's exchanges was with Karl Skorecki, a longtime friend who is a nephrologist at the Rambam Health Care, which includes a thousand-bed teaching hospital in Haifa and has a diverse staff. “For example,” says Epstein, “the chief of nephrology is an Arab Muslim woman.”

        Epstein and Skorecki decided that a drawn-out boycott against the Lancet was likely only to increase anger and not accomplish much. Their conversation shifted toward inviting Richard Horton, Lancet's editor, to visit the Rambam campus, talk with the staff and see for himself a side of Israel that perhaps he didn't know about. Epstein says he helped draft the invitation to Horton.

Editor Richard Horton speaks in Israel

       Horton accepted. In late September, he visited Rambam. After listening to the staff and others, he gave a talk on the campus, rebroadcast onYouTube. “I need very honestly to set the record straight with you. First I deeply, deeply regret the completely unnecessary polarization that publication of the letter ... caused. ... Second ... I was personally horrified at the offensive video that was forwarded by two of the authors of that letter. The world view expressed in that video is abhorrent and must be condemned and I condemn it. I have made that view, my view, very clear directly to those two individuals.”

       Epstein, who says he's seen email exchanges between the Lancet editor and Rambam staff, is “convinced that Horton had an epiphany, just like on the road to Damascus, there was a change, a realization.” He says he was told that Horton was most impressed by going on rounds and seeing patients like a young Syrian who had arrived from the war-torn country with a badly injured face.

        Duke's reaction: Horton “prostrated himself before the Zionist powers and begged for forgiveness.”

        As this post is published, Horton's apology at Rambam has been seen 4,000 times.

        Duke's video on the Zionist media conspiracy has been viewed 740,000 times.

Why Does PAMM Support the Destruction of Art? or “I am the Wei, the Truth and the Life”

By John Dorschner

      A Miami artist walks into the taxpayer-funded Perez Art Museum, sees an exhibit of a Chinese artist destroying an art work and – guess what? – the Miami guy … destroys … an art work.

      Technical score: 7.6. Originality: 0.

      Locally, the art world and the media have blasted the criminal act, in which Maximo Caminero was arrested after smashing an ancient vase that had been splattered with modern paint by Ai Weiwei. The vase was in a group of vases in front of three photos of Ai dropping a Chinese vase thousands of years old.

      Internationally, some thoughtful commentators are asking more probing questions.

       Theguardian.com's Badge Jonathan Jones put it this way: “Caminero's proclaimed motive – that the Perez Museum in Miami should be showing local, not global, art – is pretty daft ... but he has accidentally punched a massive hole in the logic of contemporary art.”

      The hole is this: How can the art world celebrate a Chinese guy destroying a work of art while condemning a Miami guy for destroying a work of art?

Ai Wei Wei vases

Courtesy AW Asia collection, New York.

       The quick answer could come from Fox News: Private property. Ai Weiwei owned the vase he dropped and the other vases that he slobbered with bright paint. Caminero did not own the vase he broke.

        So does that mean if a wealthy collector buys a Van Gogh and sets it afire, that's OK? I'll bet most people would say no. What happens if he says he's doing it to protest the Chinese dictatorship, as Ai did when destroying his vase? How many people would approve destroying a Van Gogh for that?

       What's more, did the Perez people check the bills of sale to show that Ai had paid for the vases before messing them up? Probably not.

        This takes me back to a conversation I had several years ago with local art collector Norman Braman. I had just seen at Art Basel a large, bare tree that had been assembled by Ai from Chinese wood. It sold for $460,000.

         Did that make sense? “It makes sense because who the artist is,” Braman responded. “This is Weiwei. He's a world renowned artist, and his works are in demand. Now if this was by Joe Blow, it wouldn't mean anything.”

         So when Ai WW breaks a vase, that's art. When Caminero does, it's a crime.

       A second issue for American viewers: We'd care a lot about someone destroying a Van Gogh, but how many of us give a damn about an ancient Chinese vase being destroyed? How many visitors to the PAMM were offended when they saw photos of Ai shattering an ancient vase? I sure didn't hear an outcry.

Whoopsie

        In 2010, critic Garth Clark, in an analysis I found at artasiapacific.com, noted that Ai had himself photographed dropping “a superb, 'museum quality' urn that had survived for 5,000 years in pristine condition.” (Clark then went on to repeat an oft-told observation: “The mystery surrounding the frequent claim that the artist dropped one of the thousands of excellent fakes in current circulation will never, for lack of a better word, be cracked.”) Would that make Ai a fraud? Or might it show, as Clark suggests, “the depth of his desire to clown his audience”?

       So how much are these vases worth? The art world seems a bit confused on their origins. Several museums that have hosted the vase exhibit say they come from the “neolithic Han Dynasty.” A simple web search shows that means two different eras. Artsmia.org says the Han Dynasty ceramics are from 206 BC to 220 AD. Neolithic ceramics are from 6000 to 1000 BC.

         When the vases were shown at the Museum of Contemporary Craft in Portland sin 2010, the museum's website described them as neolithic -- “dating to 5000 BCE.” Others, like the critic Clark, say the dropped vase was from the Han era.

Caminero, who later apologized

          After Caminero's arrest, the police said he had broken a million-dollar vase. How much might Ai have paid for it? I checked eBay and found that you can buy vases claiming to be Han or neolithic (sometimes with a question mark after the description), for $50 to $2500.

           Those all could be fakes, of course, but Clark, the critic, writes the vase Caminero smashed “has also been wrongly described as one of the rarest vases in the world. It is actually, as far as antiquities go, a fairly common and relatively intensive pot produced in huge quantities in its day. Ai has many of these pots in his possession and replacing it will not be difficult."

          Clark went on: “The New York Times report rightly notes that a similar work, called Group of 9 Coloured Vases, consisting of Neolithic vases painted by Ai in 2007, sold at Sotheby’s in London in 2012 for $156,325, a price that included buyer’s premium. That makes the value closer to $17,399."

The celebrated Ai Wei Wei work -- a Warhol-type ancient vase

Courtesy Tsai Collection, New York.

          So Caminero committed no million-dollar act. In fact, he wasn't even the first person to destroy an Ai vase. Back in 2012, notes Robert Everett-Green at theglobeandmail.com, "Swiss artist Manuel Salvisberg photographed collector Uli Sigg dropping Ai’s Coca-Cola Urn. The resulting triptych, entitled Fragments of History, exactly mimics Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn. Nobody was charged that time, because Sigg owned the thing he smashed for the sake of creating a new photographic work.”

          You can see Sigg's destruction here.

           Ai's celebrated Coca-Cola vase was created by altering an ancient work of art, a kind of pop-art graffiti to add the Coke logo. When asked about destroying antiques, according to Marjorie Howard in Tufts Journal, Ai supposedly said, “Well, it's worth more now.”

           Poor Caminero is such an unserious artist that he didn't even bring along a video team to record his destructive act. But he's certainly made artists think. James O'Brien wrote at DailyServing.com, a website dedicated to contemporary art: “Ai Weiwei has no right to destroy or deface the work of others. The Taliban destroyed ancient sculptures and that was rightly denounced as a tragic crime against world art and culture. There is no reason for the world to applaud Weiwei's destruction of ancient pottery. His acts are a crass publicity stunt and an insult to the original artist and the people who love these priceless artifacts. There is no high-minded art-babble that can disguise this stunt or fool people into thinking it is anything other than a contemptable crime.”

          Now, amidst all this discussion, no one is arguing that anyone should be allowed to destroy pieces in museums. Just the opposite. Destroying any museum piece not only deprives the public from seeing the object, but it also drives up museum insurance costs, which translates into higher admission charges.

           Still, the fundamental question remains: Should museums be celebrating the destruction of art work, by Ai or anyone else? Shouldn't museums be opposed to the destruction of all art?

          As Amelia Caruso, a commenter at DailyServing.com, put it: “What goes around, comes around.”

A $2 million display down a Wynwood sidestreet and other Basel 2013 moments

Critic's Choices

 By John Dorschner

     With the heart of an amateur afficionado, this intrepid surveyor set out to see as much Art Basel that he could take without paying for admission or valet parking. This meant occasionally using a bus to get to and from Wynwood, which worked just fine. Let others complain about skimpy hors d'oeuvres, crowded streets, too many out-of-towners or slow valets. I had a great time.
    Here are my highlights for a fabulous week of art.
     
    Most unexpected moment:  The Now Contemporary Art, down a little side street in Wynwood. A friend and I peeked in near the end of a tiring day of a lot of walking, and got a huge surprise: A large installation by the Colombian artist Federico Uribe. Old briefcases made into a boat. A chandelier made of forks. Legs and shopping bags hanging from the ceiling, trees made out of baby suckers.
    It was so good I made a two-minute video of it, which you can watch here. In the video, with narration by assistant director Eliana Baddour, I called the work magical realism, but since the title of the show is The Realm of the Unreal, perhaps magical unrealism is a better title. The whole thing can be  yours for $2 million -- and I think it'd look great in a museum, though maybe it's too much fun and not enough captions. (See Why?WhyNot below.)
    More about Uribe here. More on the Now gallery here.

Eliana Baddour at Now

Kate Clark's zebra

     Made me look twice, then three times: A human-like face on a zebra. I saw this at Art Miami (which required a $25 ticket, but somehow I got a VIP card free in the mail). It's by Kate Clark, represented by the Muriel Guepin Gallery in New York. I think the rep said it goes for about  $38,000. Her work is a great mixture that shows how humans and non-humans are to each other.

   Photography -- The Taiwanese photographer Shen Chao-Liang riveting work is at the Dina Mitrani Gallery, 2620 NW 2nd. Ave. A lot of good stuff. I particularly liked his Stages series -- colorful, portable Taiwanese stages that are unfolded on site. These photos were shot at twilight, with 30- or 90-second exposures.

     Video -- A sometimes funny, sometimes disconcerting three panels at the Rubell that kept my attention, particularly the center one which showed two geese tied together at the neck.

      Why? Why Not? Well, I still don't stand around admiring a Warhol Campbell soup can or Brillo box, even if it's now worth tons of money. And being a fearless curmudgeon, I'm not shy in wondering about Ai Weiwei. He may be a great dissident and showman, but if you have to read the caption to appreciate the art, then the caption is the art, right?
    Prime examples this year: A Ton of Tea at the Rubell. So Weiwei (or more likely his helpers) compressed tea into a cube that's brown, which is near a concrete slab that consists (supposedly) of individual layers of Chinese government sayings piled on top of each other (so you can't see them).
    And then at the taxpayer-subsidized Perez we get two Weiwei Bowls of Pearls. They are large ... bowls ... of ... pearls. That's it. I didn't read the caption.     One of the defining points for rich art collectors is that gallery reps explain to them how wonderful something is because it signifies the cosmic crisis of  xxxx  -- the caption! It's really a plus to the collectors and sales people that philistines (like me) grumble about it.  Then it must be art!

If these were Biblical pearls, then I guess I'd be the swine.

 Oh, and I almost forgot. In the land where caption is king, I walked quickly past a piece of unfolded paper until my companion brought me back, insisting that I read explainer: The point was that this paper -- with a few silly words on it -- had been pulled from the artist's vagina. Aha! Now it's art.

       Supporting Local -- Worth a visit whenever you get a chance. The Purvis Young Art Museum at 255 NW 23rd Street -- the home of the art of the celebrated Overtown-Liberty City artist, with views ranging from the serious to the Daffy.

The Purvis Young Art Museum

Video Interviews with famed restaurateur Mark Soyka

     He's hitting 70. His fabled News Cafe will be a quarter century old on Dec. 2. A print interview with him appears in the Biscayne Times coming out this weekend and at Biscaynetimes.com. Soyka was one of the first in creating energy on Ocean Drive and his opening of the Soyka Restaurant is seem by many as a major step in rejuvenating Biscayne Boulevard.
    Video excerpts of the interviews are available through the MiamiWebNews channel on Youtube:
     -- Soyka discusses here what gives him "goose bumps" -- a passion for vintage cars that's leading to a new business venture.
     --  He talks here about how his status as a technological "dinosaur" led to his decision to keep News Cafe open around the clock.
     -- And he tells here how he left his native Israel for New York, where he met developer Tony Goldman at "whiteys' night" at a roller rink in Bedford-Stuyvesant -- a relationship that ultimately led him to coming to South Beach, first to manage the Park Central Hotel for Goldman and then, on a Goldman property at 8th and Ocean, creating the News Cafe, starting in a kiosk and expanding until it is the best known gathering place, with 350 seats, on Ocean Drive.
    These videos are part of the new MiamiWebNews channel on Youtube. Among others, you can also see here an interview with Miami author Marvin Dunn about his latest book, The Beast in Florida -- A History of Anti-Black Violence.