Happy 195th Birthday, Karl Marx! The artist Ottmar Hörl made you a present — 500 of them. These three-foot-tall Karls-gnome-hybrids in clusters all over Trier in west Germany, where Marx was born.
People seem to be amused. It’s definitely going over better than when Hörl had planted an army of gnomes mid-Nazi salute in Nuremberg. See, anything Nazi is illegal in Germany. A full police investigation was launched to find out just how Nazi those Nazi gnomes were.
“I want to inspire pedestrians to think about Karl Marx in a different way,” the artist explained.
Each plastic socialist is its own unique shade of red.
For now, the collected writings of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels are available for free download on the Marxist Internet Archive, a distribution method that's decidedly in keeping with the two giants of socialism's ideas. However, Lawrence & Wishart, a UK-based radical publishing house, is claiming copyright infringement and ordering…
The Victoria & Albert Museum just released a document under Creative Commons that catalogs all art seized by Nazi Germany and labeled "Entartete Kunst," or "degenerate art." According to the museum, most of the works were confiscated from public institutions between 1937 and 1938, and the inventory was created around…
In 1937, Hitler's Third Reich held two art exhibitions in Munich: one that showcased Nazi-approved art -- mostly conservative, realist stuff -- and another that displayed what the party termed "degenerate art," with more forward-thinking painters like Klee, Kirchner, and Kandinsky. Now, the Upper East Side's Neue Galerie is hosting…