Turkey's Freak Crisis
Most of you probably aren't aware that Turkey's having a freak crisis. If you were just to skim the news about this, you might miss some of the interesting cultural subtleties.
To the right: the freak. It's a monument to Turkish-Armenian friendship near the Turkish-Armenian border, in Kars.
Erdoğan has recently described it as--you guessed it--a freak, and demanded it be torn down.
Turkey is going berserk over this, as well it should. The number of ways this demand is disturbing can scarcely be enumerated. Here's one:
On a weekend visit to Kars, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan described the monument as an affront to the shrine of Hasan Harakani, one of the pioneers of Islam in the area in the 11th century.
"They have put a freak near the shrine," Hurriyet newspaper quoted Erdoğan as saying. "They have erected something weird. The municipality will turn that place into a nice park."
There's an observation about the freak crisis that could be lost on foreign readers who will immediately (and with reason) think "Taliban," "genocide denial," and "Hell in a handbasket." More than a whiff of all of that in the story, for sure.
But the other thing that's going on here is a class war. Erdoğan's comment here is, if not the heart of it, significant:
I know a thing or two about sculptures. You do not have to hold a degree in fine arts in order to admire a work of art.
He's playing here to something very similar--sorry to bring this up again, but it's the best way to explain it--to the anti-elitist sentiment Sarah Palin is often said to exploit. There is a huge segment of Turkey that has long felt the contempt of Turkey's educated sophisticates, who strive with especial eagerness to be cultured and European and who clearly view them as ignorant, backward, pulpit-bashing, gun-clinging, sister-marrying snaggle-toothed village hicks. Just as in the United States, modern art is something of a totem for "stuff those hoity-toity elites who went to Yale keep telling us we should like because they have degrees in fine arts and we don't."
Can you sense the contempt for the taste of ordinary Turks in this comment, for example?
“I am now traveling around Turkey for a project, and the country is full of kitsch monuments from historical figures to animals and fruits,” said Zeynep Yasa Yaman, an art history professor at Hacettepe University currently working on a project on monuments and sculptures in modern Turkish art.
“Before discussing the ‘Monument of Humanity,’ we need to talk about all those others,” she told the Daily News.
So that, too, is part of the freak crisis.
The monument is freakish, yes, but someone with an educated palette for these things might in part for that reason find it interesting and artistically moving. Although it's a lesser work, it brings to mind Joseph Epstein's 1947 Lazarus Alabaster in the New College Chapel--avant-garde, expressively distorted, moving precisely in its ugliness. And really, you're by definition part of an outrageously rarified elite if you spontaneously come up with an association like that or write a sentence like that.
By the way, when Khrushchev saw that statue on a visit to Oxford in 1956, he called it "a degenerate piece of rubbish." He was apparently disturbed by nightmares about it. On hearing of this, Epstein reportedly suggested Khrushchev "keep off art criticism, which he does not understand, and stick to his own business, which is murder."
I have no more to add about the freak.
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Comments :
Oct '10
Re: Turkey's Freak Crisis
haha, you managed to insert sarah palin in the blogpost again. that's what some bloggers like to do to get traffic.
May '10
Re: Turkey's Freak Crisis
If only we were allowed to tear down every church built in the 70's. That thing isn't just ugly, it's hella-ugly. I don't got me one of them fancy degrees in art appreciation like some of you sophisticates, but jeez louise. That's ugly.
If the Islamists in Turkey do one thing this year for the betterment of mankind, I choose the demolition of this tacky roadside disturbance of the line of sight.
May '10
Re: Turkey's Freak Crisis
I'm almost certain she's not Andrew Sullivan. He can't do his hair up on his Facebook page in the most fetching way. (Quick tip, guys, you want Claire with her hair up, but not kicking your ass; take her somewhere fancy).
Jun '10
Re: Turkey's Freak Crisis
Can you sense the contempt for the taste of ordinary Turks in this comment, for example?
Yaman might hold a degree in fine arts, but thoughtful he is not. Folk art is the product of a living culture. In my neck of the woods this so-called kitsch is held in high regard because it's part of our unique identity. Just because the hand of the artist is untrained doesn't mean his work is without merit. Yaman is a snob.
Re: Turkey's Freak Crisis
~Paules
Yaman is a snob. · Jan 15 at 4:56am
Paules--yes, I'll bet Yaman (a woman) is a snob. But just to confuse things further, you've got to believe me: she's totally right about the kitsch. There is so much kitsch-per-inch in Turkey that it would give Theodore Adorno seizures. Me, I love the stuff, but I'm not riddled with status anxiety. My status-conscious Turkish friends wince and pretend they don't know me when I show them the great garden gnome I'm jonesing to put on my balcony and ask them to help me haggle for it.
Edited on Jan 15, 2011 at 5:15amDec '10
Re: Turkey's Freak Crisis
... who clearly view them as ignorant, backward, pulpit-bashing, gun-clinging..."
Clinging to their guns and Koran?
Re: Turkey's Freak Crisis
Foxman: ... who clearly view them as ignorant, backward, pulpit-bashing, gun-clinging..."
Clinging to their guns and Koran? · Jan 15 at 5:19am
Yes, exactly--a lot of what's going on here really has to do with this, with people feeling patronized by an elite class--associated in their minds with "Europeans"--who look down on them. And no one likes the feeling that the elites are looking down on them. A great deal of Erdogan's popularity has to do with this sense--"He's a normal Joe, like us." Now of course, Erdogan and those around him are no longer anything like normal Joes; they've become a fantastically wealthy and powerful elite in their own right. But this trope--"opposition=elite, AKP=humble-salt-of-the-earth" gets repeated endlessly, as if it's still true.
Jun '10
Re: Turkey's Freak Crisis
Claire Berlinski, Ed.
kitsch-per-inch
I love anything that is hand-painted. Partly, I suppose, because I know the time and skill necessary as an artisan myself. What I loathe is mass produced kitsch like the pottery you find on sale all over Greece. Look closely and you'll see the decorations are decals. That's kitsch.
Jan '11
Re: Turkey's Freak Crisis
Anything that gave Krushchev nightmares can't be all bad.
Re: Turkey's Freak Crisis
I think it's one of the most moving works of art I've ever seen.
Re: Turkey's Freak Crisis
Speaking of episodes in the Turkish culture war, Claire briefly became a hero to the put-upon “real Turks” when she demolished Orhan Pamuk’s memoir in the Turkish press a couple years back. Expecting to be hounded for insulting the Nobelist in the name of Turkey, she was bombarded by “Finally! Someone sees the emperor has no clothes!” email. Pamuk (whose novels I generally admire and often like) could be the poster child for the Europeanized/-ing upper/upper-middle class Claire describes.
Jul '10
Re: Turkey's Freak Crisis
That is a great line by Epstein about Khrushchev. Take that, Commie.
Jul '10
Re: Turkey's Freak Crisis
While I wouldn't be going out of my way to see that piece of artwork/sculpture, I wouldn't call it Ugly!
I see some underlying asthetic meaning regarding friendship and reaching out in the sculpture.
Would I rank it with the Mona Lisa? NO!
But it beats the snot out of a painting made by throwing buckets of paint behind a Jet Engine to splash on Canvases set up in various areas in the Jetwash.
Jetwash painting isn't art because I can do it.
Of course until I was introduced to the world of 3D artwork by Poser, I used to say "If I can do it, it ain't art."
But a monkey (the primate animal found in many zoos) could do the Jetwash Painting, so it clearly Is Not Art.
Jul '10
Re: Turkey's Freak Crisis
Jaydee_007: But it beats the snot out of a painting made by throwing buckets of paint behind a Jet Engine to splash on Canvases set up in various areas in the Jetwash.
Jetwash painting isn't art because I can do it.· Jan 16 at 1:52am
While I wouldn't pay for a Jetwash Painting, I would pay to watch a Jetwash Painting being made, because it sounds cool. :)