Well, is Jewish art boring? What do you consider contemporary Jewish Art?

and whats with the trend of oil paintings with shtetl/ultra orthodox imagery?

Not Agam.


They always make it so romantic. Why not accurate imagery of starving bare foot kids with eye infections?

Right, that's what I was referring to originally -- frummy art, not all art made by Jews.

Some of it is so bad, especially American stuff. I think frum Israeli art tends to be slightly better, in quality and imagination.

Agam is on my mental list of "Stuff to buy when we have more wall space"...

I dont think contemporary Jewish Art is "boring," but its not necessarily innovative. For example, I see on etsy.com a Jewish artist selling "Jewish Pop Art" which looks like a Andy Warhol knockoff.

The romantic shtetl paintings get to me. (I held my self from calling them "rosy" in the OP.) Not just from an imagery-agenda POV, but the quality of the work doesn't impress me. When I see things like proportion being totally off.... grrrrr

You can get very small Agams. Like a mezuzah case.


That's true about a lot of things - look at that Kosher Land game or those Paskez knockoffs of the After Eight Mints.


Pet peeve: Those 3-D cut outs in the frames that are an arts and crafts excuse for art.

You mean shadowboxes (cousin to dioramas)? Man, I love those. They may not be great art but they're very attractive when done well. I also like the 2-D paper cut-outs; they're quite elegant and minimalist.

FYI, it's etsy.com, not esty.com.

We have enough mezuzah cases, and not enough walls. I'm going to take a few min to think and list all the Jewish art we have already.

By innovative I mean not only the knockoffs, but other than Agam, how many contemporary Jewish artist can you list that do something "very new" or "very unique"? And their work is found in a number of Jewish homes?

Its on my mental list of "when I am rich"

Oxymoron?

Except this of course!
http://www.museumofpsalms.com/psalms.php

I love Jewish art!

Like Hanoch Lieberman (is that his name?)

And my friend Dena Glaser. She does amazing shadowboxes and Chagall-style paintings.

I think part of the problem is that art programs in schools aren't valued enough. And that itself is due to a number of factors. Like in many fields, be it creative arts or especially performance arts, the real talents tend to be BT's.

Secondly, don't forget Orthodoxy values tradition. That means not only in terms of ritual practice, but in mindset.

You get prints for reasonable prices.

(Keep in mind for the future that ebay is convenient way to procure Agams.)

Erm. The quality is not uniformly good. But this is definitely better than the above-mentioned shtetl pictures.

That is so true. Which is why frum art is so literal (when it's not being romantic). It's like, here's a painting of the Kotel. Yawn.

(BTW, I don't think non-Jewish contemporary art is that great either. Most of it is banal but at least it's often clever.)

I recently saw some Agam lithographs on e-bay for under $500. And they weren't that small either.

I think thats a very good point. And if contemporary art is all about being conceptual or large scale instillation- thats very hard to translate into something Jewish consumers would buy.

Right. It has to have a Jewish theme to appeal to the [certain demographic], which rules out anything abstract.

Found it. Yeah, it's like Warhol meets those iPod ads.

What is this supposed to mean anyway? Got Milk? Huh?

Or this painting. I actually kind of like some of the paintings from this series, but this one in particular is too much like Van Gogh's Starry Night.

prints? prints?



I will. I have used ebay in the past to collect animation cells at a fraction of the cost that galleries sell them for.

Ok, I'm going to list what "Jewish art" I own and I hope other people will inventory their walls too. I want to see what type of overlap there is etc.
Ebgi
Simcha Back Ketubah
Bracha Lavee print
A small papercut
2 color full Micography,
2 big non-colored Micography- I cant remember the artist Update: its signed, but I cant figure it out.
a copy of a silk painting -cant remember the artist Update: Lavi G

(I've got to run to teach now...)

So sorry. It's either an original or nothing, then?

Well, I have an Agam print at home and I like it. So there.

Thanks for the link- I haven't seen that stuff before. At least some of them are much more original! I kinda like some of them, its very playful.

I've got one too.

I have an Agam print (as mentioned above), one micography, a shadowbox from Israel that is just a bunch of flowers, two prints, and a hideous painting (no idea who the artists are).

We have other prints/paintings but they're not Jewish.

I think that has more to do with training, than raw talent.

Absolutely. That's what I meant. Hence the comment about art programs not being valued in schools. I didn't mean to imply otherwise.

woody allen, steven spielberg, philip roth, IBS, Malamud, Bellows, a hundred others
Are they not artists? Are they not Jewish? Is their art not Jewish art?

That's a good point. But how many of them are Orthodoxly observant?

Thank you, Mr. Newbie von Non Sequitur. We're talking about frum painters here.

I dont understand. I thought we were talking about jewish artists. Surely Orthodox havent cornered the jewish market.
Also, Can you imagine an orthodox jew writing a poem about how hard life is, and how unfair life is. not quite.
Who needs art that talks about God's greatness/mercy/peace-loving/all-seeingness. That's prayer and its boring. It's also true or untrue if you insist on openmindedness.

Well, well, look what we've got here: a fine example of the rarely seen Loopy, indeed..

Capture its beauty in some formaldehyde ...

My first thought at this specimen's posting history was "enfant provocateur", emphasising the first part.

snarky bunch you are. the question was "What do you consider...." I thought my opinion is as good as any other. btw, all that shtetl stuff is chagall ripoff. Its really sad the lack of creativity. Some good secular art going on in Israel.

See!
No one else was sharing ( maybe they needed to get home and check the walls) but based on my observations Frum homes I see a lot of
Ebgi
MORDECHAI ROSENSTEIN
Micrography ( Menachem Boas, etc)
Ben Avram watercolors or his chagel-ish works
Sometimes Michoel Muchnik

(And Eshes Chayil/ Birchas HaBayis things... but thats not a "artist")

Did I leave anyone out?

We don't have a lot of Jewish art in our home and absolutely none of those literal and badly painted examples of wannabe art.