Kiefer in Berlin
1992; The MIT Press; Volume: 62; Linguagem: Inglês
10.2307/778703
ISSN1536-013X
Autores Tópico(s)Musicology and Musical Analysis
ResumoGerman newspapers never tire of pointing out that Anselm Kiefer's reputation as the most successful German artist since Beuys was made in the United States, and there, it is intimated, by a mysteriously homogeneous group of Jewish-American collectors. The subtext is that those misguided souls bought his art at a time when the German critical establishment knew that Kiefer, with his Teutonic image worlds, his Wagnerian monumentalism, and his nebulous disposition toward myth and catastrophe, was an irrationalist and a reactionary, if not a protofascist.' Kiefer and Syberberg, consensus has it, were the twin evils of an otherwise reputable culture. Still today German critics often reproach the American reception of Kiefer in toto for its lack of critical awareness and pictorial skepticism toward an art that is said to rely on facile fascination and bombastic mise-en-scne.2 America is said to have given in to the lure of morbid images of an aestheticized apocalypse and to the hype about the artist as redeemer. German and American views stand in a strange reciprocity: while the Germans believe that Kiefer's problematic has undeservedly enhanced his reputation in the United States, the American triumphalists have embraced Kiefer as an artist who is not properly appreciated in his home country for political reasons.3 While there is some truth to both propositions, such judgments betray mainly projective needs and the temptation of scandal: Whose Kiefer is it? And how German is he? For they block the more interesting question of how this Germanness functions differently in the United States and in Germany. When American critics praise Kiefer as the lone artist-hero who
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