I connected with Yoram (LinkedIn) via the Consulate’s Twitter handle. According to a bio on the Consulate’s site, Morad joined the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs in 1992, after graduating from Tel Aviv University with a bachelor’s degree in psychology, cinema, and communications. He previously served as head of the cinema section in the Ministry and as cultural attache for the Israeli Embassy in Rome.
MW: To what extent is it important for Israeli artists to serve their country through cultural diplomacy? How well is Israeli art received on the global, cultural stage?
YM: There are artists who are happy to know that their success helps people to get to know Israel better, some who do not care about it and some who are in between.
A week ago, an important person from one of the leading artistic agencies in the U.S.A. told me that “these are good times to be an Israeli artist in America.” I tend to believe her.
MW: Is all Israeli art Jewish necessarily? If not, why not?
YM: In my opinion, since Israel is the “Jewish State,” all Israeli art is Jewish or at least relevant to the Jewish cultural dialogue. Even Israeli art made by non-Jewish artists.
MW: Who are some of the most important Israeli painters working today?
MW: What are the most important venues for showing Israeli art in America?
YM: MoMA, PS1, Hirshhorn Museum in Washington…. In short, the major museums and galleries in America
MW: In what ways is Israeli art unique?
YM: It’s cutting edge art, dealing with “local” conflicts that are becoming “universal” like immigration etc., breaking boundaries, creative, multicultural, courageous, not restricted to one style or “dogma” and a fusion of different cultures and styles.
MW: Aliza Olmert is a very talented photographer (whose photos of eggshells I reviewed when it was shown at Hebrew Union College about 5 years ago). How, if at all, did she impact Israeli art when her husband was prime minister?
YM: She has minimized her exposure to the minimum possible.
MW: To what extent is contemporary Israeli art connected to a longer tradition of Jewish art, and to what extent is it something new?
YM: An Israeli artist – Ofri Can’ani, who is currently working in N.Y., can give a two hour lecture on the subject. I will just say that at its inception Israeli art defined itself as “anything but Jewish.” They wanted to give “the new Hebrews” a new kind of culture. Today, more and more Israeli contemporary artists are turning to our Jewish culture and tradition as a source of inspiration, and relate to it in many levels – from secular adaptations of Bible stories to a more spiritual, philosophical artistic dialogue with it.
Image: Yoram Morad, Israeli cultural attaché. AICF.
I first encountered “Peter Lamb” on Twitter (follow him @peterlamb), where his bio reveals that he is based in Texas and is “Founder of LambCreek [website] — Christian graphic design services, lover of Christ, married to my sweetie for 30+ years, my favorite 3 letter word is Dad.” I normally write a bit more of an introduction, but Peter provided his own, so I will let him speak for himself. I have only edited lightly for style.
PL: Let me say at the outset that I like these questions. They are exactly the kind of heart issues Christian creative types ought to be wrestling through. I will endeavor to answer each as honestly as I can. You are correct. I don’t like tooting my own horn. But sometimes it is necessary to explain background in order to understand the context from which one shares. I have 30+ years in the advertising and graphic design world. At four very different advertising agencies I served as an art director and creative director. Interspersed in the middle, I have had two graphic design firms. My current firm LambCreek focuses on the “Christian market” for some very pragmatic reasons. I am still vice president and creative director at an advertising agency by day. By using a pseudonym (Peter Lamb) and serving the Christian market, I can freelance with integrity and not be in conflict with my “day job.” I am unable to show huge bodies of my agency work from the past 10 years due to conflicts of interest. How’s that for transparency?
MW: According to your Twitter bio, LambCreek is a “Christian graphic design service.” Graphic design often has a lot to do with marketing and self-promotion. Doesn’t that often clash with Christian ideals of humility and moderation?
PL: Graphic design does have a lot of self promotion in it. Truth be known so do all creative arts. Show me one artist of any kind that doesn’t use self promotion in some way. It may be as simple as hanging your work in a gallery or putting it up on a website. Isn’t that a form of self-promotion? It’s just more “artfully” acceptable in some circles.
Ah, but the sticking point to your question is how to promote yourself with humility and moderation? Hope I don’t get too “out-there” for some of you.
To walk in those two very narrow paths, one must have a sure footing of faith in God that He has made you and called you to do what you do. Secondly, one must learn to walk in His Spirit. By that I mean, it is a relationship with Him. He doesn’t often lead you to do the same thing exactly the same way twice.
You see we have a false idea of what true humility really is. I once heard true humility defined as being like a powerful racehorse that is so attuned to its master’s direction, it will turn or stop with the slightest pressure of the ride’’s leg.
So with that kind of “humility” before Him, an ear to His leading, and the assurance that He has made you and called you to do what you do keeps one straying too far, or for too long into the morass of chest pounding self promotion bravado.
It is also worth stating quickly here that I have found when I do too much self-promotion, it is often rooted in fear and not faith. For example I am a self confessed SEO junkie. Grasping for that “golden three at the top of Google” can be a highly addictive form of self promotion. It is not bad in and of itself, but too much is impulsive and not faith driven. At those times, one forgets that He will take care of me if I will only trust Him. What I often tell clients is true for self promotion as well — “with God all He needs sometimes is a ’stick’ wielded by hands of faith.”
Lastly, the best and most Godly form of promotion is found in Proverbs 27:2 “Let another praise you, and not your own mouth; a stranger, and not your own lips.”
As for the amount of self promotion I intend to do this year — My personal desire is to do a whole bunch less push of me and a whole bunch more of encouraging others. Then let God bring the increase.
MW: What are some of the unique challenges that face Christian designers?
PL: We for the most part are imitators of the style and trends around us. This is not necessarily bad when one does what they do as “communication” through design, where the message supersedes the medium in importance. But as Christian artists, more often than not, we are really boring and mediocre in our work. Granted, some of this is budget driven. Some is laziness.
Some is that the Christian market itself can be way behind in styles and tastes. This can be tough on designers whose whole bent is originality.
I’m heading over to Theater J tonight to see Motti Lerner’s “Benedictus,” which I’m pretty excited about. Here’s the plot:
With the clock ticking before a scheduled US attack on Iranian nuclear sites, two estranged friends from Tehran, one Jewish and one Muslim, agree to a secret meeting in a monastery in an attempt to avoid war. With their friend, an American ambassador, pursuing his own agenda, this diplomatic nail-biter examines the ties that bind and break with the world’s fate hanging in the balance.
I’ll have a lot to say about it I’m sure.
UPDATE 3/18: Click here for my 140-character Twitter “review.”
More than 200 Buddha statues have been stolen from temples in Savannakhet, southern Laos. An expert says the statues often house relics, and some temples are built around them.
Toward a Christian (and idolatrous) angle on “Watchmen.”
Speaking of Esther, the Jewish holiday of Purim (coming up on Tuesday) is based upon the book of Esther, which has been represented in Renaissance paintings, sculptures, movies, paper cut calligraphy, and even as a graphic novel. The (future) Jewish Art Museum of Minnesota has been all over the story of Esther and art. See here, here, here, and here. My own posts on Esther here and here. Good thing Esther had the good sense to get painted by men, or she’d have fallen prey to this trend.
Art and crime. Dutch police recover 8 works stolen 22 years ago; thieves steal steal a 16th century work by Lucas Cranach the Elder from a Norwegian Lutheran church. Isn’t if funny the Boston Globe initially tells readers a Renoir and a Pissaro were stolen, and only later reveals there were greater names involved like Brueghel?
Gary Susman (LinkedIn page, Twitter handle, and Facebook page) is an editor, writer, and critic, who served most recently as senior writer at Entertainment Weekly. He has contributed to the Village Voice, The Guardian (UK), MSNBC Online, College Music Journal, Rough Cut Online, Mr. Showbiz, and People Magazine, and he has interviewed more than 500 of the “top names in the arts and entertainment” for some of his thousands of articles, both print and online. Somehow, he also finds the time to blog at Pop Culture Warrior. I noticed on Gary’s LinkedIn page that he is a member of a group for Harvard Jewish alumni, which inspired me to reach out to him for this interview. I had also seen his byline many times before, as I’m sure many of you have as well. We talked about the future of art journalism, censorship, and what the secular arts community thinks about religious art.
MW: You have 20 years of experience writing on the arts, and are a member of the LinkedIn group for Harvard Jewish alumni group. To what extent do you put the two together and write about Jewish art?
GS: It’s not something I go out of my way to do, but when an assignment comes my way, I’m happy to take it on. For a few years, when I was living in Boston, I regularly covered the Boston Jewish Film Festival as part of my film beat at the Boston Phoenix.
MW: Do you think there is any such thing as Jewish art? If so, what does it entail?
GS: Certainly, there’s Jewish art, if you’re talking about content of specific interest to Jews. If you’re asking if there’s a Jewish aesthetic, well, that’s a lot harder to say. If there is, it’s easier to identify in literature (drawing on, say, Talmudic inspiration) or comedy writing/ performance (a stylistic line that can be drawn back through Catskill comics to wedding tummlers) or music (such as klezmer) than in visual arts.
Movies present an especially difficult case. Neal Gabler’s book about how the Jews invented Hollywood suggests an auteurist aesthetic that belongs not to the writers or directors but to the studio moguls, but that aesthetic is one of self-negation, as the Jewish moguls went out of their way most of the time to avoid specifically Jewish content (lest they call attention to themselves as Jews) and foster instead an ideology of assimilation into what they perceived as white/Christian-American virtues and aspirations. (Even an early movie as overtly Jewish as “The Jazz Singer” is more about assimilation, show business, and the general immigrant experience than about the particulars of Jewish life in America.) J. Hoberman wrote a fine book about Yiddish-language cinema, which, as produced in America before WWII, followed similar tropes as Hollywood movies despite a different cultural context (much as African-American independent film, made by such filmmakers as Oscar Micheaux, did in those same years). Today in Hollywood, Jewish filmmakers are free to wear their Jewishness on their sleeves as a cultural badge, but does that make, say, Judd Apatow’s “Knocked Up” any more of a Jewish film than “The Jazz Singer”? As I said, a lot to explore here, much of it murky.
MW: Many have noted that Jews seem to be over-represented in the arts. Do you think there is anything to that claim?
GS: What do you mean by “over-represented”? Too many? Who’s to say how many is too many? Certainly, Jews are represented out of proportion to their numbers in the populace as a whole, much as they are in law, accounting, medicine, and other professions whose prerequisites of advanced education mesh with the Jewish cultural emphasis on learning. I imagine art’s potential to allow the artist self-reinvention (or self-concealment) also appeals to Jews navigating the perils and benefits of assimilation. Continue reading ‘9 questions for Gary Susman, arts journalist, editor’
Brandeis achieved (unwanted) headlines for suggesting it would sell off its museum to offset its financial troubles. Now the Met Opera is putting its Chagall works up as collateral for a loan, and Annie Leibovitz is liquidating her works. There’s not enough important Jewish art to begin with. Can’t everyone just leave it alone?
"Iconia has been on my blogroll from the very beginning" -Sincerae
Iconia
Iconia is a blog about religion and art by Menachem Wecker.
Contact: E-mail/AIM
Iconia is part of the Canonist network of religion blogs.
Search
Advertisements
WordPress database error: [Table './db6196_iconia/wp_comments' is marked as crashed and last (automatic?) repair failed] SELECT comment_ID, comment_post_ID, comment_author, comment_author_url FROM wp_comments WHERE comment_approved = '1' ORDER BY comment_date_gmt DESC LIMIT 10
I’m heading over to Theater J tonight to see Motti Lerner’s “
Gary Susman (