Just Another German Synagogue

Updated; see below.

Spanish "artist" Santiago Sierra hooked the exhaust pipes of six cars into a former Jewish synagogue in the German town of Pulhein and invited people to don gas masks and tour the gas-filled building.

The "art," called "245 Cubic Meters," has German Jews incensed. Holocaust survivors rightly point out that minimizing the terror of the holocaust dishonors its victims, according to the nifty German news service Deutsche Welle.

Sierra says he wants people to experience holocaust-like feelings.

Ha. He wants the publicity he's getting from doing something outrageous and anti-Semetic in Germany.

And I just have to ask: This is art?

Update: I was thinking: If Sierra really wanted to be provocative, why didn't he create his exhaust filled "art" in a mosque? It would have been the perfect artistic statement about Islamic anti-Semitism.

But of course he didn't do that. He knew that Islamists would mark him as a dead man if he did it. Jews will only mark him as a stupid, insensitive man.

Portrait of the artist as a wuss.

Related Tags: Holocaust, Germany, Jews, Anti-Semitism, Santiago Sierra