Webart as a Call to Action: Global Reach in a Networked Planet

The global reach of a networked planet gives artists unprecedented power to express their moral outrage as a worldwide call to action to confront hatred, bigotry, racism, terrorism, genocide, and cults of death and destruction.

Artists in the past have exhibited the moral courage to confront evil through their paintings, drawings, and prints, from the etchings of Goya recording the horrors of Napoleon’s invasion, George Grosz’s drawings of the catastrophe of World War I - the disabled, crippled, and mutilated - and his caricatures ridiculing Hitler and his Nazi henchmen, to Picasso’s Guernica crying out against the bombing practice by Hitler’s burgeoning war machine killing hundreds in a little Basque village in northern Spain. The world’s acquiesce to Hitler’s raining incendiary bombs on Guernica gave him the license to proceed with preparing for WW II and exterminating the Jews of Europe.

In the tradition of Guernica extended into our networked times, Mel Alexenberg has created a work of webart www.futureholocaustmemorials.org as a call to action to prevent a second Holocaust before Ahmadinejad executes his plan to “wipe Israel off the map” with a nuclear bomb that is Iran’s prelude to global conquest in the service of a mad ideology. To awaken an indifferent world, he proposes creating in advance memorials to honor the millions of men, women, and children murdered in a second Holocaust.

On seeing this digital-age artwork, Kenneth Treister artist/architect of the acclaimed Holocaust Memorial on Miami Beach, commented: “I do not remember being struck so sharply, like a thunder strike, by a work of art, in any form. It is so powerful. In a simple way, you tell a message that is both urgent and so sad.” Otto Piene, Professor Emeritus and Director of MIT’s Center for Advanced Visual Studies, wrote: “Mel Alexenberg, a very sophisticated artist and scholar of much experience in the complex playing field of art-science-technology, addresses the rarely asked question: How does the "media magic" communicate content?”