Diplaros: “When my homeland and my faith are under threat, they’ll find me standing against them.” Give it a rest, mate!
The spat between Efthymios Díplaros—MP and deputy leader of DISY—and the artist George Gavriel would be laughable if it weren’t hiding something rather dangerous. The trigger, as you’ll know by now, was Gavriel’s exhibition in Paphos, done in his trademark “crowd-pleasing” style.
What Gavriel does may or may not be to your taste (personally, I find it kitsch and aesthetically bankrupt), but that’s beside the point. The issue isn’t the work itself—it’s anyone’s right to create, exhibit and sell. On the other side, we’ve got the frenzy whipped up by the hypersensitive “national-patriotic” brigade, who want to ban—through threats and violence—whatever they don’t like.
Every thin-skinned type has a favourite trope: the “insult” to the sacred and holy tenets of their religion—or rather, the invention of insult, as I’ve written repeatedly. And I say “invention” because someone, somewhere, at some point will always take offence at something—a book, a film, a painting—some people are offended by other people’s beliefs.
In this particular case, beyond the usual labels (vile blasphemy, vulgar, revolting and obscene works, so-called artist, etc.), the “arguments” of the offended lot are more or less identical. But Díplaros’s are laugh-out-loud funny: “When my homeland and my faith are under threat, they’ll find me standing against them,” he said. Give it a rest, mate! If your faith is threatened by a cartoon, it can’t be all that robust.
The Archbishop hits the same note, congratulating “the Cypriot people [read: Efthymios, ELAM and co.] for their reaction” because “not everyone who has some problem can express themselves so vulgarly about our sacred and holy things.” But what’s vulgar isn’t the same for everyone, nor are the sacred and holy. The other parties play a similar game, except AKEL, which stated that “in modern democracies, freedom of artistic expression is respected and guaranteed, as is freedom to critique works of art.”
ELAM, by contrast, seized the chance to thunder against “the drivel about freedom of expression.” One twist of the Díplaros rhetoric, however, in response to the threats against the gallery and the artist, is particularly chilling: “No artist needs police protection. Only blasphemous hacks do.” If that’s not incitement to violence, what is? The Art and Good Taste Police? Defence of the… homeland?
Let me tell you exactly what it is: the resurrection of the term “Degenerate Art” (Entartete Kunst in German), which the Nazis used to brand any form of modern art that didn’t fit their ideology—expressionism, Dada, cubism, works by Jews—as anti-German and subversive to the Aryan race. In 1937, they gathered some 600 works by artists like Klee and Kandinsky for the infamous “Entartete Kunst” exhibition in Munich, to mock and ridicule the creators—they even hung paintings crooked on the walls.
After the exhibition, those works, along with another 16,000 confiscated from museums, were destroyed, sold, burned or handed out to officers (filthy art, but the money was nice and clean). The Nazis, with Goebbels leading the charge, pushed “pure” German art, with themes like family, heroism, purity…
These are the role models for ELAM and the other fake patriots. Today’s mini-Goebbels types are delighted with people like Gavriel, who knows full well his work will cause a stir—which I suspect he considers “publicity.” That’s his right, of course—after all, art that doesn’t provoke is irrelevant. Except (in my personal opinion, always) he doesn’t deserve that publicity.
Worse still, he forces us to defend him (or rather, not him exactly, but his right to be foolish), risking the impression that we actually rate his work. The unforgettable Leonidas Christakis—artist and anarchist to his bones all his life, though perpetually skint—once bought up as many paintings as he could from the frame shops, climbed onto a crate in the square (there’s only one square) and tore them up, shouting: “The content of Art belongs in the bin!”
Of course not all Art belongs in the bin, but everyone who serves it would do well to remember that getting on one’s high horse harms the rider first—then everyone else. Let’s all calm down a bit, especially those obsessed with the sacred and holy. At the end of the day, we don’t all have to agree with each other.
Everyone has the right to disagree, to believe or not believe. But those playing the offended victim should know that bans lead society towards Nazism and authoritarianism. If anything is truly vile and vulgar, and indeed criminally actionable, it’s the incitement to violent acts by senior politicians.
The photograph shows Goebbels at the opening of the “Entartete Kunst” exhibition, which he himself organised in Munich in 1937.
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