The Brutalist.

“Jewish” art and architecture…i
Should we have kept instead to our merchant-medical guilds?
Never to unleash our blank-slatist ideologyii
On a fundamentally under-equipped world?

We adore new ideas,
Over-intellectualising them,
We love making space
(with which to fill our neuroticisms).

But we need constraints!
Like 50 miles by 250 miles worth,
Lest we impose our sacred traumas
Upon unvaccinated stingy wasps.

They tolerated us,
But we trojan horsed them;
Imported our self-loathings into their prideful paradise,
As entropy does, as Greeks bearing gifts do.

But were we wrong?
Or just effects as much as causes,
As the prostitute is to the john
As the degenerate is to his vices.

Numbing opiates
Of the heart, soul, and culture,
Here to ease the pain of decline;
Not all are so strong to shoulder Fate’s burden,

Of knowledge divine.

  1. Not that Corbu, Mies, and Gropius were Jewish, certainly not anymore than Picasso or Giacometti were. But still, Jews have clearly played influential and perhaps even critical roles in “modernist” or “international style” artistic and architectural movements of the 20th century, but perhaps we shouldn’t take credit as founders, however excellent our fast-following torch-bearing may be.
  2. The Brutalist (2024). Directed by Brady Corbet. Produced by Trevor Matthews Nick Gordon, Brian Young, Andrew Morrison, Andrew Lauren, D.J. Gugenheim, and Brady Corbet. Starring Adrian Brody and Guy Pearce.

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