That up there is the artwork "Hitler Idaho" by ceramicist Charles Wing Krafft. In a catalog, the teapot was described as "These blind-looking eyes also evoke associations with...the world turning a blind eye to the horrors of the Holocaust." Funny thing about that: turns out that Charles Krafft is actually a white supremacist who doesn't believe the Holocaust happened. In other words, and, truly, this is one of those moments where you just shake your head, it's a tribute to Hitler that was owned by a Jewish art collector who thought it was a commentary on that blind eye. Nope. Indeed, it's actually one of several Hitler teapots Krafft made. He really wanted people to pour out the contents of Hitler's head and ingest them.
Until recently, Krafft kept in check expressions of his belief that "I don't doubt that Hitler's regime killed a lot of Jews in WWII, but I don't believe they were ever frog marched into homicidal gas chambers and dispatched," had his work, including a ceramic AK-47. Here's how his work has been described by various members of the art world commentariat:
"Krafft's insidiously clever juxtapositions of traditional ceramic technologies with his darkly humorous commentary on world events and media manipulation have brought him significant international acclaim."
"Krafft’s fascination with totalitarianism and its trappings is one of those risky odysseys that artists sometimes make so that the rest of us can safely view the results of their intellectual inquiries under the illumination of track lighting in a clean white gallery."
"In a brilliant conceptual choice, Charles Krafft uses and subverts the inherent ethnocentricity and traditionalism of craft objects to comment on 'resurgent regionalism', war, politics and disaster.
It would be easy to point fingers and say, "Ha-ha, stupid, pretentious pricks got played." (Although, truth be told, appalling views or not, Krafft's work is pretty cool.) But after hearing about Krafft today on WNYC, where our maven of pretension, Kurt Anderson, reported on it, the Rude Pundit thought about another bunch of fools: the right-wing pundiphiliacs who got all giddy when reporter Bob Woodward implied that he had been threatened by a White House economic aide. It turned out to be nothing more than a mild suggestion in the midst of an apology, about as far from a threat as one could get without offering Woodward coffee and a hand job. Some on the right acknowledged their initial Obama rage was bullshit and realized that their new white knight was just another shit-coated DC reporter. Of course, Sean Hannity wasn't among them.
The issues here are content and intention. For both Woodward and Krafft, their seeming intentions now changes the nature of their content. They're both assholes. Now what we do with that knowledge, whether we ignore Woodward or smash Krafft's work, is what's important.
Note: You wanna be creeped the fuck out? Check out Krafft's soap sculpture with a swastika and the word "Forgiveness" on it.
