Not everything is an artistic statement.  Some things are just obnoxious.

When South Park first came out, some people saw Cartman as a statement on blind, uninformed hatred and racism fostered in an individual too young to have reached those opinions on his own.  Some other people came to the conclusion that making fun of Jews is really really funny.

Is it better – safer – to forget our history, or to trivialize it?

That aside, I like your username. :)

His graphic design isn’t very good either.

If you want to see some real LEGO art try this: http://www.flickr.com/photos/7931559@N08/6192835432/in/photostream

http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1343/1128346049_9fb5c0b920_m.jpg

I had to remove every “Lego” from every block…

Nerd-pride aside (I love LEGO toys too), I think some of this criticism is missing the point.

It clearly says that the artist’s work is ”sponsored by…”. It doesn’t state (or to my mind imply) that concentration camps, the holocaust, or the nazis were “sponsored by…”
 
I read his intention as being to ensure that he can still use the Lego logo (do you see what I did with the wonderful alliteration there?) whilst making it clear that this was a piece of work by the artist and not intended to be confused with an official Lego product. Adding “has been sponsored by” achieves that.
 

I’m not saying I think (or the artist thinks) that we necessarily *should* rub our children’s noses in the awfulness of the world, but… well, My daughter is now eight, and through her whole childhood I’ve been naggingly aware of the gap between the world we show our kids and the world there is (think of the idealised one family small farms in children’s books for instance).

I also think the artist was a dickhead for lying to Lego about what he wanted the bricks for, but I do think he has something to say.

They were good enough to give him some free bricks, and he wasn’t good enough to a) use them properly (it has nothing to do with OCD), and b) refrain from pointlessly bashing them with the ‘sponsored by’ bit.

Also, love the skeletal Lego dudes.

I guess they mean never again in western Europe…

At no one in particular:
  I couldn’t disagree more with the idea that the Artist owed Lego some sort of patronage. It was a donation, to an artist. Notice how Lego gave up as soon as a layer got involved? This isn’t the renaissance, artists value comes from their freedom to express themselves freely, for Lego to expect him to obey their rules just shows them up as idiots or charlatans. Good for the artist for hoodwinking them. I can’t help wondering whether these opinions would also still be expressed were Lego to be replaced with BP or a big bank… I like Lego much more than I like BP, but you have to judge each by their deeds!

  I’m afraid that I also feel giving some sort of veto to survivors of the Holocaust is completely wrong. On a personal level, hurting these people would be the last thing I would ever want to do, BUT I would not judge another artist for creating works that do. Any work of art which deals with such awful events will always cause some harm to some number of people, and whilst my heart goes out to all of them, the worst thing we can do is to forget of what humans are capable. Consider even that many Germans find the memory of the Holocaust harmful, would you spare remembrance of the Holocaust to spare Germans harm? I don’t think they would.