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Greg Johnson interviews Huffington Post award-winning artist Charles Krafft about a very eventful 2013, during which he was “outed” as a “holocaust denier” and White Nationalist and subjected to a media witch hunt. Topics include:
- How the Krafft controversy got started
- How it went viral on the web and led to interviews and print coverage
- Why he stopped giving interviews
- Advice for White Nationalists being interviewed
- Professional fallout: being blacklisted from college speaking
- Professional fallout: being dropped from a Paris exhibition
- Professional fallout: The Sacramento Museum put a warning label on one of his works
- How this controversy has, in the end, given him more artistic and creative freedom
- The personal fallout: some friends lost but new friends gained
- Letters of support from White Nationalists and local free speech supporters
- On balance, he received more positive than negative responses
- The shocking lack of intellectual integrity in the media and “educated” public
- Professional fallout: no net loss of income, an increase in sales and commissions
- New artists Charlie has met due to this controversy
- Greg and Charlie conspire in public to create a New Right art journal dealing with contemporary and historical figures
- The model of ‘zines like Jim Goad’s Answer Me!
- The importance of Adam Parfrey’s Apocalypse Culture
and Apocalypse Culture II
- How whites are increasingly intellectually unplugging from the system
- Culture is created on the extremes
- Charlie’s Facebook page as microblog
- Some final advice about how to deal with being outed as a White Nationalist
- Why it helps to be self-employed
- Why he has no regrets
- Why truth is more important, ultimately, than the opinions of others, and why you can’t turn back once your eyes are opened to the truth.
- People who are outed today have it far easier than people in the past who died for their ideas.
- How the news cycle works for us: readers grow bored quickly, so the vilification will end
- An invitation for writers interested in contributing to a New Right art journal or anthology to get in touch
8 Comments
Charlie Krafft is such a sweetheart. haha. Who could honestly dislike this guy?
By the way, I did see this one attempt at a possible art journal: http://www.mjolnir-magazine.com/index.html
But that seems dead in the water, so to speak. They announced it and haven’t printed or produced a thing.
Kudos to both Greg who did a delightful job in interviewing Charley, and to Charley for being so forthcoming and open. Charley is both a brilliant artist and a wonderful personality who I never get tired listening to or reading about.
I believe that Charley, with his clarity of thought and courage to voice it, is in an ideal position to help promote our cause not only within the sphere of the avangard art subculture but also to the general art loving public.
Greg, you’re getting very good at this!
Thanks
Excellent. These broadcasts are really good.
Greg, it doesn’t show up in the itunes podcast feed – the last one being the interview with Richard Spencer (1/10). I listened on the page b/c who wouldn’t enjoy listening to this… so nonplussed.
I will look into this. Thanks.
This is excellent. Has anyone pointed out that this year is the centenary of the Vorticist’s BLAST! magazine? If we get ours out by July (the month that Blast was published in 1914) we will be able to fully capitalize on whatever solar cyclic mystical numerology that entails.
I have long wanted to put out something like this. But it seems Greg is best situated for giving our manifesto full impact.
Dare we engage in Marinettian air-raid typography? Or is that already too passe?
I propose a series of serrated edges cutting against all trends of art post WWII. The irony-clad hipster thinks he is being bold by “deconstructing” when in fact the true revolutionary artistic act in our age must be constructive. As Chesterton once said, or implied: any fool can dismantle a carburetor. It takes much more sophistication to assemble or invent one.
Krafft work is a great heresy not so much in that he questions the received history of the modern age, but that he dares fool those who thought his work was only trivially ironic…When in fact he explodes irony into new dimensions. Hitler as teapot not a denigration of the man, but as commentary on how denigration itself has become as much of a suburban reflex response as to bedeck like a nicknack the windowsills of any unthinking pleb.