Bartholomew's Notes

From Newsweek:

The owner of fashion brand Balenciaga has been targeted on social media over what some have branded a “disturbing” selection of child-themed art pieces that have been hosted and sold on its auction website.

…The mannequins featured on the Christie’s website were made by artists Jake and Dinos Chapman and show depictions of naked children, a number of whom are conjoined.

The children depicted are not just naked or conjoined: in one item sold by Christie’s auction house and archived on its website is entitled Fuckface, and consists of a boy with a phallus for a nose above a gaping orifice.

François-Henri Pinault is CEO Groupe Artémis, which owns Christie’s along with a number of other high-end companies and brands. This includes Kering, a fashion group that in turn includes Balenciaga. The suggestion is that Balenciaga’s recent regrettable photo-shoots and the Chapman Brothers’ artwork are both examples of a sinister conspiracy that Newsweek does not delve into but which presumably involves co-oridinated efforts to “normalise” the unspeakable, or to taunt the public with hints and signs of “elite” degeneracy.

The are obvious parallels here with Pizzagate and QAnon – significantly, Pinault’s wife is the Hollywood actress Selma Hayek – as well as other attempts to discern sinister hidden meanings in art and symbols. Some social media coverage also gives the false impression that the mannequins are being mass produced as sex dolls (e.g. Dominique Samuels: “The CEO of Balenciaga’s parent company, Kering, sells sickening child sex mannequins”), despite their grotesque characteristics.

Also drawn into the story is a Russian-born stylist named Lotta Volkova, who has worked with Balenciaga in the past. Another Newsweek article has the details:

Following the backlash some people dug up content of several former and current staff at Balenciaga, including Volkova.

Christian commentator Oli London took four posts from her Instagram which portrayed scenes of violence and Satanic images.

…The images shared by London included one of a woman who is nude from the waist down, lying on a pentagram on the floor where she is tied up by rope.

A satanic-looking figure sits on a pentagram-shaped throne at her head, also nude from the waist down, with smoke coming out of his upturned hands.

Shades here of the Pizzagate obsession with Marina Abramovic. Oli London has also targeted Rachel Chandler, a modelling agent worked with Balenciaga in 2016. London alleges that Chandler had visited Jeffrey Epstein‘s island (unconfirmed, and perhaps extrapolated from a photo of Chandler with Bill Clinton), and from this he asserts that “Balenciaga is deeply involved in child abuse and exploitation”. He outlined this theory in the UK on GB News, in conversation with the broadcaster’s resident televangelist Calvin Robinson.

The Chapman brothers’ child mannequins date from the mid-1990s, and they have always been controversial. Police visited the Victoria Miro Gallery in London when some were displayed there in 1994, and one item was removed from display in Italy in 2014 following protests following allegations that it was “paedo-pornographic”.

The mannequins have been put into context by Kieran Cashell in a book called Aftershock: The Ethics of Contemporary Transgressive Art (I.B.Tauris, 2009). His interpretation is that the Chapmans may “cynically and shamelessly appropriate morally transgressive material purely for its controversial currency”, but that their work may also “be considered a critical interrogation of the capacity of the culture industry to indemnify every artistic transgression according to the implicit moral approbation conferred by the aesthetic attitude”. Further:

…the idea of their bizarre configurations being considered conduits of paedophilic desire seems highly unlikely… The specific distortions the plastic children have endured at the hands of the Chapman brothers become successful objective analogues of psychological damage caused by sexual abuse. Physical interference, in this instance, is transformed into an effective simulacrum of aggravated psychological harm.

Perhaps, in 2022, such art is even more problematic now than it was in previous decades, and its visibility should be weighed against other considerations – although if the work of the Chapman brothers disappears from view I look forward to the usual laments about “cancel culture” and assertions of the right to cause offence and upset.

UPDATE: Another claim is that one photo includes a roll of Balenciaga yellow tape, which has been deliberately misprinted as “BAALENCIAGA” as a reference to Baal. In the photo only the letters “AALEN” are properly visible. It seems to me more likely that the tape starts with a truncacted “ALENCIAGA” and then wraps around so that the second printing of “BALENCIAGA”  – or perhaps the first “BA” of the third printing – aligns with the first word on the top layer, creating a double-A effect. However, even if that is the explanation believers will just say it was staged that way deliberately.

In the UK, the claim featured on GB News in a conversation between Mark Steyn and Eva Vlaardingerbroek, billed as a “legal philosopher” but better known as a former FvD candidate now based in Sweden and associated with the Sweden Democrats.

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