A Burning Man exhibit that places Barbie dolls in an “Auschwitz-themed” diorama has been criticized by the Anti-Defamation League as “deeply offensive and inappropriate.”
The exhibit, “Barbie Death Camp and Wine Bistro,” was created by 65-year-old artist James Jacoby, who is Jewish, and started off as a “small” idea with a friend from a Jewish fraternity who became a wine merchant.
Jacoby told J. The Jewish News of Northern California that he’s been staging the same camp at the festival for 20 years, and that he is sensitive to the offensiveness of the exhibit as his father was a WWII Air Force pilot who was shot down and captured near Berlin, but said that this is part of the point of Burning Man.
“We certainly don’t want to trigger anybody,” Jacoby said. “But Burning Man is not a safe space. It’s not Yale University. You don’t get to run and hide from something you don’t like. There’s 1,100 theme camps. If you don’t like ours, go to another one.”
The camp features a large number of nude Barbies in a march towards three life-size kitchen ovens while others appear to be “crucified” on pink crosses.
Jacoby said that the camp hosted 220 people this year.
“We have received a number of complaints,” said Seth Brysk, regional director for the ADL. “Certainly individuals have a right to free expression. But using that free expression to trivialize the Holocaust for the sake of political, social or artistic ends is still deeply offensive and inappropriate. And we would ask people not to do so.”