p class=maintext>The healthy public rebuke of our three Ohio University distinguished professor patriots who attempted to censor an art exhibit on war at Alden Library -has heartened me. Apparently this was done on their own -without help from the Patriot Act.
A free and unfettered library is one of humankind's greatest social inventions. War is such an obscene human institution and art such a profoundly significant means to help us understand this obscenity. Allow me to share some thoughts on this trinity -library, art and war.
Thank goodness we are a long way from Hitler's 1933 brown-shirt book toasting and Sigmund Freud saying, It is better that they burn my books than me. But perhaps we need to be concerned. The Patriot Act does have its nose in our beautiful library tent.
Examples of art confronting the bestial essence of war are numerous. For example, Picasso scorned U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell with Guernica on February 5, 2003, when he gave his United Nations thumbs-up speech for Iraqi shock and awe.
Otto Dix, a machine gunner in World War I and a German artist, painted war in all its absurd non-glory brutality. Dix made such an impression that soon after the Nazi regime came to power in 1933, he was dismissed from his professorship at the Dresden Art Academy with the following note of justification -apart from the fact that some of your paintings are a gross offense to moral feelings and therefore a danger to moral regeneration, you have also painted pictures that are likely to impair the will to defend oneself.
Creative librarians, artists and curators of art in all its forms everywhere -hurrah for you. Thank you for your contribution to our search for sanity in these foul fogs of war.
-Chuck Overby, an Emeritus Professor of Industrial and Systems Engineering, is a veteran of World War II and served in Korea as a combat pilot. Send him an e-mail at
overbycm@hotmail.com.
17 Archives
Letter to the Editor
