My review of Idol Anxiety at the University of Chicago’s Smart Museum appears in the Forward (link here). Here’s a selection:
Most of the works that appear in the exhibit Idol Anxiety, at the University of Chicago’s David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art, feature Christian and pagan content. But exhibit curator Aaron Tugendhaft credits the “heightened awareness” he developed from studying the Talmud as a child with helping him discover “valuable distinctions not seen by others” in the process of how objects avoid becoming idols.
Two of my articles appear in this week’s Washington Jewish Week (neither is art related):
- “It’s all relative: Tattoo design leads to 100-plus family reunion” (link)
- “Electric cars for all Israelis? That’s the plan for start-up company, says rep” (link)
Read my review of Panim el Panim: Facing Genesis, Visual Midrash by Debra Linesch and Evelyn Stettin here.
Here’s the lede:
What do you get when you mix a Jesuit publishing company, a Reform Jewish scholar, an Orthodox Jewish painter, and a thesis on human-divine encounters?
In Panim el Panim: Facing Genesis, Visual Midrash, the product is a surprisingly coherent collaboration of image and text, which not only examines the book of Genesis, but also seeks to uncover real-world lessons and advice from the biblical passages that are accessible to all sorts of readers.
Nextbook is very lucky; expect even greater arts coverage from it. Story here.
Of course Rabbi Simcha Weinstein is the one to find it.
Ben Schachter, an assistant professor in fine arts, seems to think so, and he has won a Saint Vincent College Research Grant to work on a project called “An Aesthetic Application of Jewish Dietary Laws upon Painting, Drawing and Printmaking.” Here’s some more info:
“Kosher Art” will apply the Jewish traditional dietary laws of Kashrut to the creation of art. Each step of the process including the tools and materials will follow these rules. In so doing, the project will find a new solution to the challenge that is inherent in all Jewish Art, namely the prohibition against graven images.
I am interested in hearing more about the project, but the last line is not encouraging in the least. There is no challenge “inherent in Jewish art,” and to simplify the second commandment in this way reflects a poor grasp of Jewish history. Further, aside from symbolic discussions about the building of the Temple and the Tabernacle, Jewish artists have readily created works that used non-kosher animals. If Schachter wants to break new ground in this regard that is very exciting, but one wonders also how this will offer a “solution” to the alleged challenge.
Jon Weece, senior minister at Southland Christian Church in Lexington, Kentucky, is a great preacher, who regularly tackles important material with an accessible approach and a sense of humor.
In the recent series, “Seriously?!” Southland’s former senior minister Mike Breaux pinch-hit for Weece on the topic of “some of the more unusual phrases in the Bible,” particularly, Jesus’ instruction to “Eat My flesh.” (E.g. here, verse 54.)
Breaux’s talk was compelling, and one of my favorite parts of his sermon was when he talked about the Etch A Sketch he keeps in his office (next to a Tupperware ball) to remind him of how he hands the scribbles of his life to God, who returns a clean slate. What a great religious art metaphor! (You can read more about the toy in his book Identity Theft on Google Books here, page 159.)
But Breaux also said something about Jews, particularly rabbis, that is simply not true, and I think it’s important to point this out.
You know how some parents think their children are simply perfect, and though you want to tell them their kids are great, but not that great, you think it’s really sweet that they take such pride in their kids? Religious people should feel that sense of pride about their God (or Gods); it’s what you are supposed to feel if you are a person of faith. But when that pride comes at the cost of putting down others, it’s important to step back and wipe off the boundary between propaganda and religion.
Breaux turns to John chapter four to discuss Jesus’ unique ministry to a “a woman of Samaria” at a well in Sychar. Breaux praises Jesus for addressing the “really broken” woman, “even though Jewish rabbis were not supposed to speak to Samaritans, they were not supposed to speak to Samaritan women, or women in general in public.” Yet, Jesus talked to this one, “because he knew she was broken … he was always breaking rules, in fact they weren’t really rules, they were just barriers people had put up.”
Perhaps Breaux knew of the passage from Ethics of the Fathers that states, “One who speaks excessively with a woman brings evil upon himself, neglects the words of the Torah, and will go to hell.” (See here, number 5.) But frankly, I’m not so sure he knew the reference, and if he did he’d know to dig a bit deeper. The Talmud is packed with references to rabbis counseling women, and intelligent readers would know not to confuse the sense of modesty in Jewish scripture with any kind of censorship of coed conversations. There is just no reason for this cheap shot at Jews in an otherwise great sermon (save another reference to Jews as “spiritually blind”) and the audience deserved better.
Says Margot Layland of a Jewish center in West Nashville in a great article on “God and art.” [Image: The Tennessean]
One person involved said he hopes “the number of Jew and Christian participants would increase.”
Even as one rabbi says it is scarce in today’s major religions, idolatry is “far more widespread than one may think” among Catholics, and a rabbi tells a kid to tear up an idolatrous photograph in a new film.
My review of Four Seasons Lodge, a documentary about Holocaust survivors who vacation at the same bungalow colony in the Catskills, appears in this week’s issue of The Jewish Press.
Here’s a selection:
“Four Seasons Lodge” is not your typical Holocaust documentary. On the one hand, there is the plot of the people who survived the death camps now struggling to save their summer camp, which they call “our paradise in the mountains.” Meanwhile, these individuals are straight out of the “Twilight Zone”: a quickly fading demographic clinging to a summer lifestyle that seems to have outlived its usefulness. Though bungalow communities initially offered New Yorkers a way to flee the city’s hot summers, today’s air conditioning and more globalized travel ambitions have left bungalows to become ghost towns. But ghost towns apparently are very welcoming to people haunted by ghosts.
Adi Nes’ version of Leonardo, from the Israel Museum’s (Jerusalem) “comprehensive survey of contemporary Israeli creativity from the past ten years,” called “Real Time: Art in Israel 1998-2008.”
The Republican running on an “anti-Sharia” platform tells FrontPage:
Our education system is bankrupt at all levels. Our universities do not prepare our young minds to see anything bad about Islam. Here in Nashville at Vanderbilt University you can get a degree in Islamic Studies and never read the life of Mohammed—and never read the entire Koran. You study Sufi poetry, Islamic art and Islamic history viewed as a glorious triumph. No kafirs suffer in this program and there is no history of Jew, Christian, Hindu or Buddhist suffering under Islamic rule for the past 1,400 years. A graduate from this program then goes out into the world professionally trained to be an apologist for Islam, a dhimmi. And this program is standard at all schools, not just Vanderbilt.
Is initially a flop, but later becomes a better character, says Dara Horn.
He founded the Center for Jewish Art. (HT: jewish-heritage-travel)
Art News Blog adds some good quotes.
By the second viewer at Madame Tussauds’ Berlin.
UPDATE: The man may have been motivated by a bet.
From Steven Spielberg’s foundation. (Museum site here)
And re-purchases two of the three 1,700-year-old Roman golden medallions for an undisclosed sum.
My colleague Richard McBee reflects on three biblical works. Money quote: “Let’s ignore what the artist says and just look at the sculpture.”
The artist himself had a series of run-ins with the law for sex crimes.
The diplomat and founder of Ottawa’s National Arts Centre was Anglican but “was thinking the same thoughts as a Catholic or a Jew or a Muslim” and felt “The soul is a more important part of our being than character.”
Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava in front of the bridge he built in Jerusalem, which is supposed to symbolize King David’s harp:
Bridges are instruments of peace.They join places that were separated. They permit people to meet.They even are meeting points.They are done for the sake of progress and for the average citizen.They even have a religious dimension. The word religious comes from Latin, meaning “creating a link.”
This particular understanding has a very deep meaning,especially in Jerusalem,which contains in its name the words shalom,salaam,peace. A bridge makes a lot of sense in a city like Jerusalem.
From: Artdaily.org.
Not American Idol, but the Israeli “Upcoming Voice.”
Asks Raz Shaw, who spends “very little time” thinking about his faith.
“If this was a relationship being held together by a thin red bracelet, it may have just snapped,” says The Sun (UK) of Ritchie’s marriage to Madonna.
They had been confiscated by Saddam’s secret police. “We bought them from thieves,” one Jewish collector said.
Chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov (born Garry Weinstein) is asking Russians to save a museum which memorializes Andrei Sakharov. The museum is controversial for showing an exhibit in March 2007 called “Forbidden Art” which took on religious fundamentalism and which offended Orthodox Christians.
