Ezra Maas: An Oral History

Part Eight

Artists, writers, journalists, photographers, critics, friends, and others, who were around Maas during the years 1956 to 1996, give their impressions of the artist. Interviews by Daniel James.

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Jack Cleeves, culture editor at The Washington Post, 1988 – 2001.

JC: One of my favourite stories was from about 1997. An American billionaire, supposedly a quantitative trading genius who made his money from tech-focused hedge funds and venture capital, heard it was possible to get an audience with Maas – for a price. One of his ultra-rich buddies told him of rumours that Maas admitted three people a year into his private compound for a direct audience, and that the whole arrangement was managed by the Maas Foundation. No one knows how much he actually paid, but they say it was over a million dollars. So he’s flown to some secret location – a former monastery in Switzerland or something like that – and ushered through several levels of security and ante-chambers until he’s seated in a private room. Naturally, he’s expecting to meet Ezra Maas. Instead, a screen lowers and Maas begins to talk to the three attendees via the monitor. All they can see of his face is a close-up of his mouth, just his lips and teeth, in an otherwise darkened room. His voice is a hiss through the screen, and his words are barely audible. The craziest thing is that the guy loved it. He wanted to pay for a return visit.

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Emmanuelle Franks, a particle physicist at the University of Oslo.

Maas was a polymath, and one of his passions was science. In 2001, while the world believed he was secluded in his mansion, he spent six months working at a research centre on the Antarctic ice, near the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station. The centre is searching for cosmic neutrinos – often referred to as ‘ghost-like particles’ – because they pass through the universe, almost without interacting with anything. Maas travelled to our station in secret, with a very small entourage, and stayed in spartan private quarters on the base under a pseudonym. No one knew who he was, why he was there, or what he was doing, but everyone was under orders to grant him anything he asked. We all thought he was a billionaire who was funding the research – and maybe he was? It was only later that we discovered the mysterious stranger was Ezra Maas, the artist. My colleagues and I were looking for cosmic neutrinos off the shoulder of Orion. Our discoveries led us to a distant galaxy with a supermassive black hole at its heart. We were staring into the eye of a monster. I remember Maas once asked us, “Does the monster look back?”

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Corey Loeb, co-editor of The Third Eye and expert on US cult groups.

CL: The Maas Foundation is no different than any of the other famous, international, cults. They’ve just done a better job with their PR. They’ve got armed compounds in the States, masquerading as research centres, and schools for the gifted, full of second and third generation members. It’s not about art or money for these people. That’s what makes them really dangerous. They’re true believers, and Maas is their religion. C’mon, don’t look at me like I should be wearing a tin-foil hat. This is serious, man. The Maas Foundation has been brainwashing people since the ’60s. They used to spray the brochures to their exhibitions with hallucinogens that were absorbed through the skin. Maas hired actors to read out poems full of trigger words, and they used strobe lighting, and musical cues, to induce hypnosis and seizures. Those ‘happenings’ were the first experiments, and they only got more sophisticated from there. You’ve heard of Cicada 3301? Who’d you think posted that? The Maas Foundation has been recruiting people through the internet since the early ’90s. They post esoteric puzzles, involving encrypted pieces of Maas artwork, on message boards and file sharing sites that lead people down a rabbit hole, from one site to the next. They target intelligent but vulnerable people, the games designed around structures, patterns, and visual stimuli that will appeal to their minds – a trap tailored just for them. They’ll get you too. Just you wait. That’s what they do. They get everyone in the end.

END OF PART EIGHT