It is almost impossible to imagine, but an Israeli art student made six trips to Auschwitz for the purpose of stealing artifacts, which she then fashioned into an exhibit at one of Israel's leading art schools. As reported by Liel Leibovitz at Tablet, a graduating student named Rotem Bidas took "small tin pots, a metal screw, a few shards of glass, even a sign warning visitors against removing any artifacts from the museum’s grounds" for use in her senior project at Beit Berl College. Bidas, who is the grand-daughter of Holocaust survivors, explained that her goal was to show how "morality is something that changes from time to time and from culture to culture.” In an interview with the Israeli website Ynet, she explained that “Millions of people were murdered according to the moral laws of a certain country, under a certain regime. And if those are their laws, I can come up with my own laws."
Remarkably, Bidas's teachers approved of the project, going so far as to praise her for creating "an irreproducible encounter with a past event that has been shrouded in many layers of words, symbols, and representations.” According to Bidas's advisor, "she didn't steal, but rather took an artifact through which she could become a partner . . . She tries to wound the conventional system of representations."
Both Bidas and her teachers apparently need a reminder, so here it is: No, you cannot come up with your own laws. And you certainly cannot desecrate one of the most important historical sites in Europe just to make a point about shifting morality.
There is nothing about one's status as an artist — or an ethnographer, for that matter, as readers of The Faculty Lounge may recall — that justifies serious criminality. Stealing from Auschwitz is wrong in virtually every conceivable way — legally, religiously, morally, ethically, historically, and probably even artistically. Bidas is evidently an undergraduate, and young people are often given to bad judgment, but there is no excuse for her faculty enablers. You are free if you wish to make your own sacrifices for art, but you have no right to damage even the smallest remnant of the Holocaust.
I think this — particularly the last sentence — runs together the legal and moral issues. What she did was wrong on both scores, but for different reasons, and her arguments about making up her own laws fail in very different ways. People damage remanants of the Holocaust all the time, in legally and morally permissible ways — but these particular ones are legally protected, and her reasons for damaging them are morally deficient.
This is not art. This is theft of cultural property. In the US we have NAGPRA (Native American Graves Preservation) and various criminal antiquities statutes. Several years ago, I saw a yellow Start of David for sale at an antique store in Western Illinois. Had it been for sale for under fifty dollars, I would have purchased it and promptly donated it to the Holocaust Museum. It had a price tag of $350.00 so I promptly called the Anti-Defamation League…These sacred objects should not be appropriated for commercial or thinly veiled artistic purposes.
So the response to an artist who seeks to dramatize the subjectivity of legal norms is "no, you cannot come up with your own laws"? That seems nothing more than ipse dixit argumentation. I'm not sure I agree with the project, but I am hardly surprised that some would endorse it.
First, stealing a sign that warns visitors against stealing artifacts is a great touch. In and of itself, this move is hardly objectionable and is certainly not desecration or "serious criminality". It typifies an artist's objection to the very notion of "sacrosanct" and "beyond question".
Second, the artist's personal connection to the Holocaust informs her actions too. This gives it a context. Perhaps we should condemn stealing actual artifacts (not signs about them), but this was not about promoting hate or desecrating. The piece asks us to question about how we feel about how we memorialize beyond-awful events. She may have felt that turning everything into a museum deprives the event of its real humanity and locks it in a place where it does not belong. History should not be so chained. Perhaps a few tin pots, a metal screw, and some shards of glass belong in Israel?
On the other hand, maybe the artist was wrong. At this point, all I'm sure about is that ipse dixit argumentation won't persuade me. What is right or wrong about how we remember is not at all a simple affair and I'm glad when art gets us asking important questions.
One man's artist is another man's criminal …