Remember: No one is ever “just kidding.”
Despite everything his hip, educated, Obama-voting admirers told themselves, this guy sure wasn’t:
He crafted a ceramic Hitler-bust teapot now in a San Francisco art museum, and put swastikas on other pieces of art, even on a ceramic wedding cake. He made a ceramic Uzi assault rifle, hand grenades and an “assassin’s kit” – a gun and dagger.
Now, the 65-year-old hippie-turned-artist is at the center of a growing controversy following a published report detailing evidence — including his own words — that suggests he is a white nationalist who believes the Holocaust is a myth.
“I believe the Holocaust is a myth,” Krafft says on a podcast published last July. (…)
“Krafft has always been an iconoclast, but now his iconoclasm is hardening, becoming a deadening ideology. The older he gets, the more his opinions seem to be calcifying, degrading.”
***
Translation from the liberal dialect:
Iconoclasm is awesome as long as yer “clasming” the “correct” “icons.”
In reality, iconoclasm is always “hardening” and “deadening,” and is a seductive, universal impulse.
Because idolatry is the sin condemned in the first two of the ten Commandments, and these Commandments are written on every (non-psychotic) human heart, we vaguely sense that we are doing good whenever we smash icons.
Sometimes we are, and sometimes we aren’t.
But most of us either lack the habit of sound discernment, or find that habit to be a total buzzkill.
Anyway, I always liked this guy’s ceramic weapons, but for non-ironic reasons he wouldn’t have approved of one bit.
The Meret Oppenheim mix of materials decidedly not “following function” struck me funny for a few seconds at a stretch. I figured he made them out of some hippie peace-and-love, war-is-bad conviction, whereas I just think guns look cool. So I was wrong, too.
Never noticed the Nazi motifs on his work before though. If his patrons thought it was “cool,” then they obviously missed the part where Sid Vicious and Siouxsie Sioux were wearing swastika t-shirts in 1976; that is, before some of them were even born. Yawn. Also they were stupid lower class teenagers, not “sophisticated” 60 year olds.
