A Dubious Gallery of Characters

I'm begging the Chief of Staff, and using this subtitle for that purpose: Please, dear editor, don't assign me to write about Galeria again

When ideology becomes an excuse and the excuse becomes an ideology  (Source)

Contrary to popular belief, which holds that it's easiest for a critic to trash, for a cat to meow, and for a bitch to bite - the real challenge in criticism is writing about the truly bad. When there's not a single good word to lend credibility to the critique, when it's not even clear what the value of the subject of criticism is, and therefore it's unclear what the value of the criticism itself is and why to dedicate your time to the matter. Thus, there's no real point in writing about Galeria's weekend supplement, which embodies the bottom of the bottom of "Haaretz's" degeneration (so far!), but only about the "cultural" phenomenon behind the "cultural phenomena" supplement.

The Galeria supplement, which in itself isn't even worth a bark, is not a newspaper but an exhibition. It's not meant to express content but to represent, display, promote, show, and be seen (and advertise). It doesn't have writers but types of people: the Mizrahi woman, the Arab woman, the feminist, the old man, the new man, etc. Unfortunately, the gallery's display still lacks a black color. In fact, I'm convinced that if such a "human" type were found to fill the missing (and black) slot - Galeria would immediately slot them in. The fact that it doesn't matter if it's an Ethiopian or Eritrean writer (two quite different populations, as we know) - that's what's funny about it. And what won't you find there? Religious. Ultra-Orthodox. Right-wing. Cat.

Galeria is (by definition?) Haaretz's lowbrow culture supplement, in contrast to the highbrow culture that Zipper was (supposed to) represent. If Haaretz's supplement in the Uri "Blacky" Mark era represents the classic modern left - of injustice, oppression, and distress - imported to us from Europe, then Galeria is the embodiment of the new postmodern left of identity politics, imported to us from America. This connection between low (sorry, popular) culture and identity politics is not accidental. In both cases, it's about pretense, or perhaps staging, of real culture and content, where the representation itself is perceived as the content (collapse of the signifier into the signified? Does the meow replace the cat?).

What distinguishes real content (or in the political case - real action) from a representation of such? Content with news value should be innovative - saying something that hasn't been said before - while in representation, repetitiveness is what confirms it, because it's a performative theatrical ritual. When it comes to a newspaper, it's simply boring to read Tzafi Saar's predictable stance (representing the women's restroom side), or to expect exciting new developments from Zachar Beta every week (representing the men's restroom side). Both are there only because there are two sides to restrooms, which of course need "representation" (and let's not forget that today, restroom stalls are multiplying rapidly!).

So is the well-known ritual of a "promotional article" in Galeria about some product of low culture (book, show, movie, etc.) pretending to be an interview (blabber at the level of a vapid salon conversation). Or the ritual of the article about the important (yeah, right) cultural phenomenon (as if) that you haven't heard of (and rightly so). We all know the script of such articles. In fact, we could all write such articles ourselves without effort. The exhibition in Galeria is of the pathetic kind of an artist looking in the mirror and feeling brave as a tiger when in fact he exerted himself like a cat (see: The Plague of the Firstborn).

In this sense, of hollow art lacking standards, this is a very contemporary gallery, and kudos for having someone who expresses (=has nothing to say), and finally represents silenced voices (=who have nothing to say), and shows us on the superbly designed cover (=replaces the pressing need to say something of value) a black transgender stand-up comedian who turned into a Muslim feminist and asks to be referred to as a vegan cat. In Galeria, the left plays pretend with itself.

Haaretz newspaper deals a lot with itself - that is, with the degeneration of the Israeli elite, and particularly with the sources of its political failure. But Galeria is the failure of the left - the bankruptcy of the next generation. If this is where the young energies are going, and if this is where the thinking of the future generation is being shaped and expressed - then there really is no future. Because intellectual shallowness translates into predictable and clichéd journalistic discourse which translates into political impotence. Who would want to join such a crappy club? I swear, Chabad's Shabbat leaflet is more exciting, challenging, and creative than Galeria - and that's because the Rebbe was a wild genius, a rule-breaker and nonconformist (and a bit cuckoo...), while here conformism is the Rebbe. And he's not really the genius of the generation. Aren't there young, talented, and crowing cultural figures in Israel? Don't you have this in a bit more cuckoo?

If there's an article about culture in Galeria, it will always be at the level of culture industry and power politics in the field, for example institutional power struggles, appointments, pressures, or success with critics, consumers, or on the internet. This is the essence of Galeria's worldview: culture has no content, only power relations. This is the takeover of thinking by the political, and this is the hidden form of thinking that Galeria instills in its consumers. Hence also the shameless prostitution in favor of popular culture: what succeeds and is strong is culture, because there is no quality criterion, no hierarchy, only quantity of influence. Traffic turns from a constraint into an ideology. Therefore, all articles are boring because they don't deal with the thing itself, but only with dealing with dealing with dealing with the thing itself. What's important is what they say about who says about what they say. And who cares about that?

My beloved agrees with me that Galeria is the peak of Haaretz's disgrace as a newspaper, but argues against me that it's not ideology but genealogy that's at the root of the matter. Unlike other degenerating institutions, like Haaretz's supplement and Culture and Literature and the news pages, Galeria has no respectable history or tradition to degenerate from. It never had a golden age. It was a supplement for housewives that turned into a supplement for thinking housewives (and they still think like housewives, even if they're young hipsters). All this shows how important it is to preserve the remaining historical self-respect of the other supplements - lest they all turn into a museum of galleries, supposedly the most up-to-date and "interesting!" but in practice the most degenerate and boring. They're definitely on their way there. Galeria is a glimpse into the future of "Haaretz", when Lisa Peretz will be the newspaper's editor after Aluf Benn, and God will punish the Israeli intelligentsia for all its sins.