A new Richard Serra exhibit opened at MoMA with an early opening for corporate sponsors at 8am. There are some amazing large metal torqued and angled installations which are designed to walk through. The feeling I get from walking through them is akin to when I walked through The Siq at Petra.

I admit that I got swept up in the hype over the cartoons of The Prophet, may he not rest in peace at the horror of the actions of his followers, when I got in a fight with a cab driver and told him to chill out for he was very angry. I then suggested he might want to take out his prayer rug from the trunk and pray to Allah for peace. When he was enraged (which was the point, duh), I told him that if that upset him, I have some cartoons to show him. Score one for multiculturalism here in NYC. Anyway, I have been trying to get copies of the Iranian repartee cartoons but no luck so far, only text descriptions are online.

Most of the descriptions seem to be prerecorded, phoned in from the normal set of stereotypes of Jews. But this one is great:

That sentiment finds expression in a split-image cartoon from a Brazilian entrant in which a stand-up comic is portrayed performing in a venue called the West Club. In one image, captioned ‘Making jokes about Islam’, the comedian is greeted with raucous laughter. But the accompanying picture, marked ‘Making jokes about the Holocaust’, shows him being booted out of the window.

Did this genius miss the whole The Producers hype? The whole thing is a spoof on accounting, production, and THE HOLOCAUST! Maybe someone should send him a copy of the soundtrack so he can sing along to the mocking of Hitler, Germany, and so on. I cannot imagine anyone reading this has not heard of The Producers…

As has been noted, no one is burning anything in the streets, in fact this topic is hardly in the news here. I even would relish the MoMA or The Met doing an exhibition on the history of antisemetic or racist cartoons which includes both the Danish and the Iranian cartoons. Often you can examine your own perceptions of race, the changes in culture, and just laugh at the cliches. Do I need to point out the juxtaposition here, I doubt it.