If something is called "not for sale", it can mean two things.

Objects that their owners do not want to give up at any price are not for sale.

Objects that nobody wants to pay for are also not for sale.

When the organizers of this year's Documenta in Kassel, the Indonesian artists' collective Ruangrupa, attach great importance to the unsaleability of the art they are showing, it is ambiguous.

The gesture against the art market that true art shouldn't be for sale could also be a thumbs-up for things that nobody wants unless they're given away.

You certainly don't even want to get anti-Semitic graffiti as a gift.

Ruangrupa's relationship with the boycott movement against Israel had been discussed for weeks.

It was constantly said that there was not a single anti-Semitic statement by the group.

We were informed by a writer that the boycott movement BDS, to which some invited artists belong, is “partly anti-Semitic,” but so is the British Labor Party.

Well then.

Nothing that important, nothing that bad, said the writer, who would also like to decide who is allowed to write on the subject at all, namely only people who have had an educational trip to the Israeli-occupied territories behind them.

For his part, Ruangrupa gave the impression that a clarifying discussion series on racism and anti-Semitism that the group had planned had been canceled under external pressure in the form of censorship.

It was the management of the Documenta itself that backed down.

Jews as incarnations of evil

And now in Kassel you can see works of art that are openly anti-Semitic.

Several pictures by a Palestinian artist compare Israel's policy in the Gaza Strip with the Nazi air raids on the Basque city of Guernica, which in 1937 were the first attack in recent military history with the aim of wiping out the entire civilian population of a city.

A picture by the Indonesian artist collective Taring Padi, on the other hand, shows Jews as incarnations of evil, as wolfish business bosses with sidelocks and a hat that says “SS”.

And as helmeted pigs in shirts with the Star of David belonging to the Israeli secret service.

One does not have to be specialized in medieval plastic art to recognize the motif of the "Judensau" inciting pogroms.

This picture was only hung up by the world press after the days of the preview, right in the center of the city and the exhibition.

Are the Documenta organizers now trying to fool us into believing that it wasn't finished on time, that they hadn't seen it themselves beforehand?

It had previously been exhibited twice in Indonesia alone.

What did Ruangrupa want to say to the world when they installed this botched work by their compatriots on the show's parade ground?

The picture, they now explain, offers "anti-Semitic readings".

That means: You can read it, but you don't have to read it that way.

How then?

The artists, on the other hand, cannot, with the best will in the world, recognize any anti-Semitic motif in their work.

They are sad about it, they say, that it is understood that way.

The now concealed work becomes "a memorial to mourning the impossibility of dialogue".

Ruangrupa and the general director of the documenta, Sabine Schormann, were seriously planning not to take down the banner, but only to cover it.

Righteousness to the end.

The mendacity - the pig with the Mossad helmet symbolizes the Indonesian military, the man with sidelocks and SS hat capitalism - competes in such statements with self-righteousness and mockery.

Did you imagine a dialogue about the thesis that Jews and the Israeli foreign secret service were responsible for Indonesia's misfortune?

Are you sad that hatred of Jews cannot be discussed in Germany?

The eternal assertion that something like this is only anti-Semitic in this country attempts to culturally relativize one's own meanness or indifference.

Using all conceivable political kitsch, Ruangrupa has raised the Indonesian rice barn to a symbol of collective decision-making.

“Lumbung”: friendly sharing of surplus crops.

The self-praise included claims that the group enables an alternative economy of sustainability through its curatorial work.

It was said that the Kassel ecosystem had been intensively dealt with.

With the shown pictures apparently not so much.

Or yes - but then one can now speak of a documenta of deviousness.