Museum of Degenerates
An explosive exhibition of art by a celebrated cartoonist chronicling America’s march toward right-wing authoritarianism.
Museum of Degenerates invites you to a delirious display of art by one of contemporary America’s most original and incendiary political cartoonists. Eli Valley’s extraordinary work is a scathing indictment of the entire American polity, with a particular focus on the issues of Israel and Judaism at a time when these have moved to the center of public debate and action.
In these pages, Valley tips a homburg to German expressionists such as George Grosz and Otto Dix who featured in “The Exhibition of Degenerate Art,” a 1937 Munich show that sought to ridicule the work of artists critical of Hitler’s fascist regime. In an aesthetic that is strikingly original, Valley also draws on early twentieth-century American Yiddish cartoons and the work of artists who created the helter-skelter exuberance of MAD comics in the 1950s.
Valley’s own art, accompanied here by extensive descriptions of its genesis and context, is a howl of protest against the political, cultural and media elites driving America into an authoritarian abyss. Here is anger, pure and hot, expressed in exquisite detail and, often, disturbingly funny.
Eli Valley is the author of the critically-acclaimed Diaspora Boy: Comics on Crisis in America and Israel. His work has appeared in Jewish Currents, The New Republic, The Baffler, Gawker, and The Chapo Guide to Revolution (Atria, 2018).