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.