Ingrid Lomfors svarar idag på den kritik som har riktats mot hennes kritik av Elisabeth Åsbrinks bok Och i Wienerwald står träden kvar, vilken i sin tur har diskuterats tidigare på Axess-bloggen. Lomfors vidgar perspektivet och visar på den internationella diskussion som förs om det problematiska med fiktionalisering av Förintelsen. Detta med utgångspunkt i den kritik som har framförts mot Steve Sem-Sandbergs roman De fattiga i Lódz - till exempel av Simon Schama i Financial Times.  Problemet med fiktioner i relation till fackböcker berör givetvis mer än Förintelsen. Det finns något i sig problematiskt med böcker som gör anspråk på att berätta något ("sant") om verkligheten, samtididigt som varje kritik mot den framförda beskrivningen kan bemötas med påpekandet att det faktiskt handlar om en fiktiv berättelse, där författaren är fri att handskas med stoffet på det sätt han eller hon önskar.

Det är talande för det svenska debattklimatet, att det är så svårt att föra den här sortens diskussioner. Den som vill problematisera och diskutera, uppfattas som en person som kommer och stör den trevliga stämningen på en fest. Det ska helst av allt vara den där gemytliga samvaron som signaleras av bild och text till en annan artikel i kulturdelen i dagens DN: samtalet mellan Sven Wollter och Tomas von Brömssen. Inte en kritisk fråga ställs om Sven Wollters livslånga engagemang i det stalinistiska partiet "Kommunistiska partiet".

Samma sak gäller diskussionerna om konst och estetik. Jean Clair är medlem av franska akademien. Han var tidigare chef på Picassomuseet i Paris och har varit ansvarig för en mängd utställningar under årens lopp, till exempel om Bathus och Duchamp. Här kan man läsa en mycket intressant text av honom där han diskuterar konstens utveckling under 1900-talet med utgångspunkt i Marcel Duchamp.

Frågan är varför det känns som att man aldrig skulle kunna läsa en dylik text, skriven av en svensk litteratur- eller konsthistoriker i motsvarade position.

Så här avslutas Clairs text:

The turn of the century, we've seen, participated in a grand moment of occultism and "physical research." This, which was formally regarded as the supernatural, phantom-like apparitions, miracles, revelations, was from then on indebted to the pursuit of science in piercing "the invisible." If the ancient religious bond with the world had expired, the belief in the powers of the beyond didn't just go out the door, since artists and intellectuals, physicians and poets, every explorer of the psychic realm grew to celebrate these powers. And every member of the avant-garde of the time, from Kandinsky and the those in Munich to Mondrian, from Malevitch to Kupka - this avant-garde that Duchamp, with his associations, his friendships, his readings and his trips confirm - participated in this religious science, fearful of optimism and the lay ideal for a better society, but no less swept over with the belief in the dimension of revelation. This dimension - for the ease, let's say, in occurrence, "symbolism" and "decadence," in their two contradictory but indissolubly bonded facets that are a modernizing or socializing symbolism that dreams of a better society, and a satanic symbolism, or "diabolic nature," like the opposite of symbolism, that wants an apocalypse and is fascinated by the fall of man - this in any case is the belief that art possess in itself a dimension of "unveiling" (to use the term of Schuré, Péladan and Blavatsky for the many "initiates") that compels its supporters to become the magi or, as Duchamp would say, the "mediums."

Thus, after 1923, came a time of disillusion and apathy. Duchamp défroqué. Duchamp idle. Duchamp the chess player. Duchamp the prophet of contemporary art. Duchamp the genius of American art. This other Duchamp, who spent his life commentating on his first gestures and giving them an often confusing meaning, at the last minute announced, in the 1960s, a second construction that had been underway beneath our very eyes during his last years: the installation of a religious without religion. The secular religion of art emptied of substance, extinguishing the faith in its transcendental powers of knowledge, abolishing in consequence the ideology of the avant-garde, is replaced with a religiosity without religion, which no more tests the need for an objectification of its belief but is contented with individual manifestations, idiotic configurations, self-celebrations, micro-experiences without validation, without sanction, without a church - other than the benediction of a State which, we've seen, was finally taken into account.

But had Duchamp wished for such evolution? Would he have accepted it? He had painted, in Munich, a tableau, Bride, which is in every respect his masterpiece. The chromatic finesse of the grays and the ochre, the declination of the reds and the greens, a lesson in anatomy without precedent, without posterity, makes this icon of cubism, irreducible to the things common to cubists, a work of infinite charm which placed Duchamp right away in the ranks of the great masters. He had established his supremacy.

Now, when he abandoned painting and decided to plunge himself into the sterility of the window of the Large Glass, was it a rebellion of dés mallarméen, the dizziness of a virgin in the Hérodiade? Abandoning the toil, its warmth, suppleness, and its organic life, abandoning the pigments and their bond with the earth, he chose the materials of a laboratory, the glass of test-tubes and vials. For a long time, crazy with powerlessness, he said he only bread dust, like others, and in the base of petri dishes, grew colonies of protozoa. The culture of melancholia. And it was lead, the metal of Saturn, that he chose for creating shapes and it was minium that he chose for covering surfaces, an oxide of lead, a preservative but also a preparation for color to come and which wouldn't come, an under-layer for a coat never to be found. Could one, more lucidly, more painfully, more cynically, choose the power of gray against the green of the tree of life and, in accordance with this theoria, with this intellectual view, this morose speculation, the preeminence of the practical and experience over the senses, sign a pact with the devil that thousands of lost children would sign after?