<– Kidding! Berlin isn’t really totalitarian, but it’s worth noticing that that old brownshirt spirit lives among the cultural elite in the German capital. As Steve Sailer points out, the blog of the Berlin Bienniale defends artist Martin Zet’s exhibition there, in which he invited people to give him copies of a popular German book critical of immigration so he could burn recycle them. According to the right-thinking Igor Stokfiszewski at the Berlin Bienniale:

Discussion about Zet’s proposal must not be colonized by the fantasies of others—by flames in their heads which immediately subject every reading of the artwork to the argumentum ad Hitlerum, while the initiators and those involved are blackmailed by the immanent world of one’s own paranoia. The discussion should take place within a framework that is most easily described as truth, and which consists of: the artist’s true intentions; the actual intentions of the curators; and, plainly speaking, the subject matter of the project Deutschland schafft es ab.

Zet opposes the xenophobic and racist message presented in Sarrazin’s book. Therefore, he has suggested an action that would make it possible to actually reduce the existing number of copies in circulation. This idea corresponds to the general theme of the Biennale, according to which artistic actions should be focused on effecting a real impact on reality and offer ways of transforming it permanently.

Moreover, the project by the Czech artist draws upon a collective mobilization and its range is the condition of the work’s failure or success. In other words, it is up to German society to decide how many copies of Sarrazin’s book Zet should receive, and how many will be left on the market or on the shelves of private libraries. The intention behind the artist’s actions is to refer to a direct democratic procedure and civic decisions made by fully-fledged autonomous subjects. This intention once again corresponds to the themes of the Biennale, which seeks to contribute to a democratic revival and to a growth of direct participation of citizens in developing collective opinions and making decisions that shape the life of a community.

A German-language video report on the Zet installation is here. Shorter Igor Stokfiszewski: “Yes, we’re inciting the public to destroy books once again in Berlin, but it’s completely different this time, because we’re on the left, and we’re right.”