"Does it matter that they are Jewish?", asks the annoyed reader. "So there are a few Jews in the thoroughly anti-Christian, profane, totalitarian world of modern art. So what? They are still a tiny minority". Well, not really.

The large database on Jewish influence in the US, gives following names and numbers (Incidentally, the database uses exclusively Jewish sources):

The Jewish influence in modern art is well attended. By 1973, some estimated that 75-80% of the 2500 core "art market' personnel of the United States - art dealers, art curators, art critics, and art collectors -- were Jewish[ii]. In 2001, according to ARTnews, at least eight of the "Top Ten" US art collectors were Jewish: Debbie and Leon Black, Edythe and Eli Broad, Doris and Donald Fisher, Ronnie and Samuel Heyman, Marie-Josee and Henry R. Kravitz, Evelyn and Leonard Lauder, Jo Carole and Ronald S. Lauder, and Stephen Wynn.

"Today," wrote Gerald Krefetz in 1982, "... Jews enjoy every phase of the art world: as artists, dealers, collectors, critics, curators, consultants, and patrons. In fact, the contemporary art scene has a strong Jewish flavour. In some circles, the wheelers and dealers are referred to as the Jewish mafia since they command power, prestige, and most of all, money."

In 1996, Jewish art historian Eunice Lipton explained that she went into a career of an art historian in order to be in a field dominated by Jews: "I wanted to be where Jews were -- that is, I wanted a profession that would allow me tacitly to acknowledge my Jewishness through the company I kept."[iii] The field of art history... was filled with Jews. One might even say it was shaped by them[iv].

At the Metropolitan Museum of New York, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger (former publisher of the New York Times) eventually became its chairman. He oversaw an institution in which Jews, says George Goodman, "have enriched every area of the Museum's collections, including pre-Colombian ceramics (Nathan Cummings), African art (Klaus Perls), ancient Mediterranean and Middle Easter Art (Norbert Schimmel), Old Masters Paintings (Lore and Rudolph Heinemann), French decoration arts (Belle and Sol Linsky) modern European Art (Florence May Schoenborn), modern American art (Muriel Kallis Steinberg Newman; Edith and Milton Lowenthal), Indonesian bronzes (Samuel Eilenberg), and South and Southeast Asian Art (Enid Haupt and Lita Hazen, Walter Annenberg's sisters).[v] Throughout the Met too, galleries, rooms, theatres, and gardens are named after Jewish sponsors including Iris and B. Gerald Canter, Helene and Michael David-Weill, Lawrence and Barbara Fleishman, Howard Gilman, Leon Levy, Henry R. Kravis, Janice H. Levin, Carroll and Milton Petrie, Arthur, Mortimer, and Raymond Sacker, Laurence Tisch, and Ruth and Harold Uris. (Among the various Jewish curators at the Museum is Barbara Weinberg, head of American Paintings and Sculpture).

By the 1980s, four of the ten board members that dole out the MacArthur Foundation "genius awards" were also Jewish; two Jews also sat on the board of the Russell Sage Foundation.[vi] The Kaplan Fund has also had an important impact on the art community in divvying out awards. One of J. M. Kaplan's daughters was the Chairman of the New York State Arts Council.[vii] Joan Kaplan Davidson was appointed as chairman of the $34 million New York State Art Council in 1975 despite the fact that she was "not professionally trained in the arts." Her mother, Alice Kaplan, was once president of the American Federation of the Arts.

The Getty Museum, founded by the non-Jewish oil mogul, J. Paul Getty (and with $4 billion of funds, the richest museum on earth) has consistently had Jews at the economic helm. In 1998, after 17 years, Harold Williams left the presidency of the J. Paul Getty Trust. Williams, notes George Goodman, was "raised in a Labor Zionist home in East Los Angeles."[viii]. The new president of the J. Paul Getty Trust is another Jewish administrator, Barry Munitz, formerly the chancellor of both the California State University system and the University of Houston.

The fact that Jews are so dominating in the art world is very rarely publicly acknowledged. It is forbidden -- as always for anyone, anywhere -- to discuss the subject for fear of being branded "anti-Semitic." Typically, as example, an entire 1989 academic volume on the "Sociology of the Arts" fails to mention Jews as sociological entity in the modern art dynamic. There are analyses of art galleries, "artist groups," art patrons, and art audiences, broken down into gender, age, income, occupation, and even "racial and ethnic minorities." We can find that, negligibly, "blacks, Orientals, and persons of Spanish origin constitute about 7% of the art audience," but there is nothing whatsoever about Jews, even their own percentage of that "art audience," let alone how many art galleries they own, museums they direct, and articles they generate about art value.[ix]

Why did it happen? What is the reason of Jewish success in the field of Modern Art? It is not due to great achievements of Jewish artists: they are quite modest, and despite the PR support of Jewish art collectors, curators and critics, they are well within what could be expected for a fifteen-million-strong wealthy community. Interaction of wealthy Jewish collectors and philanthropists with Jewish critics active in the Jewish-owned media provides us with a partial answer.