The Hitler Show; the Jewish Museum revisits the Nazis.

Ten years ago, Bruce Nauman was asked by officials in Hannover, Germany, to conceive a Holocaust memorial for their city. He came up with an idea that has become a cherished legend in the art world, although he eventually decided against proposing it. The work would feature a sign that said, "We are sorry for what we did, and we promise not to do it again." When I tell people about this, they invariably crack up. What's so hilarious? I think it's the succinctness of the statement: Nauman isolated the two emotions -- remorse and repentance -- that are the rhetorical burden of any German memorial to the Holocaust, and he stripped them of folderol. When you think about it, for fifty-seven years an apology and an assurance have been what the world has wanted to hear from Germany and, really, all that the world has wanted to hear. Whatever else might be said has belonged to the victims. Of course, with the dying out of the Second World War generation, this state of affairs was bound to change. Today, both direct responsibility and proprietary grievance regarding the Holocaust are expiring like patents, and the business of reflecting on it has become a free-for-all.

An unsurprising controversy surrounded the Jewish Museum's daring exhibition "Mirroring Evil: Nazi Imagery/ Recent Art" well before it opened, on March 17th. The show represents thirteen mostly young, little-known conceptual artists from seven countries and makes a case, in the words of its curator, Norman Kleeblatt, for "works in which viewers would encounter the perpetrators face to face in scenarios in which ethical and moral issues cannot be easily resolved." The idea of artists making clever works about the Holocaust struck many observers as an unacceptable offense to the sensitivities, even posthumous ones, of survivors. Others countered by ritually endorsing art's mission to challenge conventional thinking -- a conventional thought if ever there was one. Few took account of the show's unacknowledged but obvious inspiration: "The Producers." Now, I am among those who deem "The Producers," on either stage or screen, the funniest thing that ever was. Its effect is what a baby feels while playing peekaboo: laughter as an explosive release from anxiety. We were afraid that Adolf Hitler would keep making us feel bad forever, but you know what? He's dead, and we're not. In "Mirroring Evil," only one of the nineteen works has a Brooksian zing to it, but the show plainly owes its timing to Max Bialystock's reign on Broadway.

Talk about bad taste? Let's. Most of "Mirroring Evil" fails not out of irreverence but out of inchoate earnestness. Take Zbigniew Libera's "Lego Concentration Camp Set," which consists of seven imprinted boxes picturing what the title describes. Rather than flip off fear, this lugubrious sally diffuses it, contaminating an excellent toy to no cogent end. There are significant and trivial varieties of shock in art. The significant kind -- the onset of Impressionism, Marcel Duchamp's urinal, "Springtime for ...