You guys might remember Rachel Papo from her stint as a Jewcy artist, during which her photos of women in the IDF generated more comments than nearly any other art we've ever featured. Now, Powerhouse Books is publishing a collection of Rachel's work. You can buy it here or visit her website for more photos.

Here's Rachel on her soldier series:

Rather than portraying the soldier as heroic, confident, or proud, my images disclose a complexity of emotions. The soldier is often caught in a transient moment of self-reflection, uncertainty, a break from her daily reality, as if questioning her own identity and state of contradiction. She is a soldier in uniform but at the same time she is a teenage girl who is trying to negotiate between these two extreme dimensions. She is in an army base surrounded by hundreds like her, but underneath the uniform there is an individual that wishes to be noticed.

And here's one of my favorites, a picture that reminds me of nothing so much as Jewish overnight camp:

Ommmmm: This guy's been hanging out in the mantra trailer"I Will Survive" + "I Am Nothing" = the truth is somewhere in between. From the addictive website for The Mantra Trailer:

Parked at the intersection of imagination, evangelism and propaganda, The Mantra Trailer is a traveling mediation space, recording studio and site of mysterious broadcast in the form of a 1972 breadbox trailer. The Mantra Trailer invites us to contemplate, chant, voice and explore our prayers, aspirations, desires, frustrations and petitions for the transformation of self and society, or whatever resonates within us, even the nonsensical. By-passers drawn to the Mantra Trailer are invited inside one at a time to contemplate and record their mantras in privacy.

Yes indeed, the mantra trailer is exactly what it sounds like! Click on any number of mantras (from the expected"Let It Go" and "It's All Okay" to the inscrutable "Pet The Wolf Run From The Rat") to create your own multi-layered mantra symphony. I especially like "Keep Your Eye on the Doughnut" plus "You Shall Know The Truth" plus "Concentrate and Expand." "Love" plus "Open Your Heart" is awesome. "It's All Gravy" goes well with pretty much everything. Go nuts.

The Sanskrit word mantra consists of the root man- (to think) (also in manas, or mind) and the suffix -tra (tool). So literally an "instrument of thought" or "mind tool." A mantra is a sacred word, chant or sound that is repeated during mediation to reduce our everyday material worries and elevate our worldly, spiritual aims.

Mantra Trailer mastermind Sherri Lynn Wood says mantras are "a homeopathic remedy for the mass media slogans of the day."

(Dig especially, then, the clever soul who chants "Visa takes Life.")

What can we learn from this painting?: The marriage portrait of Charlotte von RothschildThe Israel Museum, home of the Dead Sea Scrolls and a fantastic collection of art, has a well-deserved reputation for hosting world-renowned art exhibits. Particularly in the realm of Jewish art -- that is, art created by members of the Jewish community -- the Israel Museum most often provides a vibrant, honest experience. However, its two most recent exhibits, "Looking for Owners: Custody, Research, and Restitution of Art Stolen in France during World War II" and "Orphaned Art: Looted Art from the Holocaust," leave much to be desired.

"Looking for Owners" features pieces that the Nazis looted specifically from French Jewish communities during the Holocaust, while "Orphaned Art" features works of art looted from other European Jewish communities that were discovered in various hiding places by the Allies after the war. The art in both exhibits was collected by various organizations, professors, and graduate students who did years upon years of research in order to determine the owners of each piece and their countries of origin. An effort to return the uncovered pieces to families with legitimate ownership claims would have been an important endeavor, but instead, the entire project served as means of creating various exhibits to simply display the artwork.

Both exhibits consist of largely unrelated pieces of work that were simply owned (not created) by well-to-do Jews before the war. This alone does not establish a cultural contribution to the world of art by the Jewish community, nor do the works themselves tell us much about the lives of this portion of the Jewish community (upper-class European Jews). Instead, they merely serve as a rather mundane display of the wealth of their owners. The majority of the paintings displayed were either portraits of well-known families, such as the Rothschilds, or mediocre oil paintings of all things gold, shiny, and generally superfluous.

There are still many significant cultural contributions from pre-war Jewish communities that have yet to be salvaged from the remnants of the Holocaust. A people that, since WWII, has established a state and arguably redefined communal resilience, warrants the exhibition of more than a mere display of what was taken from them.

Starting this Sunday, the Jewish Museum in New York is hosting a fantastic new exhibit called Off the Wall: Artists at Work. The exhibit features 11 artists who will be taking over the gallery spaces at the museum with projects in music, fashion, and performance and visual arts. To help gear up for Off the Wall, check out these photos of the galleries being set up for the show. Over the the next few weeks, Jewcy will be covering Off the Wall, so stay tuned for more about artists and events.

We're also giving away tickets to the Off the Wall parties on March 20 and 27. To enter to win, send a private message saying "I want to party" to the Jewcy user Jewish Museum Off the Wall (you have to create a profile to do this). See you there!

Last Week: Wild Beasts Carved and Gilded With Love

Congratulations! You’ve managed to get through the first 2.5 weekdays. To help you get through the second half of your week, Jewcy is happy to present you with Hump Day Art. Think of it as an opportunity to devote your attention to the more cultural things in life, or at the very least, to zone out at your desk for a few minutes while you look at some pretty pictures.

This week's Hump Day Art peers into the fantasies of Israeli-born artist Ophrah Shemesh by way of her eerie series of paintings "I and Thou," currently on display at the Freight + Volume gallery in New York. Based loosely on the film The Night Porter, Shemesh's work takes on issues of sexuality, power and femininity in ways that are both disturbing and beautiful.

Last week: The Colorful World of Maira Kalman

Think, 9 x 12 inches, Oil on panel, 2007 The painter Dana Frankfort is known in the art world for her word paintings, which manage to invoke color-field, graffiti, and graphic art in an exultant chorus that feels fresh, moving, and very, very alive.

“The words,” observed New York Times art critic Roberta Smith of Frankfort’s first solo show in 2005, “usually rendered in large, blocky letters that fill the canvases, glide in and out of view, a little like towering neon signs seen through fog. ‘Now’ emerges from a field of yellow, as ‘Hallelujah’ does from a horizontal blur of red-pink-orange, and ‘Yes’ from a small square of progressively greener greens. Other less distinctive works use exuberant but more notational writing to broadcast phone numbers, list the days of the week or exclaim, ‘For the Love of God.’”

Lines, 57 x 96 inches, Oil on linen on panel, 2007 Frankfort’s latest show, DF, ran at Bellwether Gallery in Chelsea from late September through early October. In it, she moved further into her word work but also introduced a (controversial) new subject: Stars of David. Jews have expressed indifference to, contempt for, and revulsion at these new paintings, which attempt to bring the much-maligned (but not oft-painted!) symbols into high-art context.

I first met Frankfort at the least likely bastion of artistic genius imaginable: Camp Ramah in California. 

***

How did you come to the use of words in your paintings?

I’ve always been interested in color field painting. In grad school I was painting abstract, large, geometric fields of color. I came to realize that my decisions were arbitrary. There was no reason why I was putting red next to yellow -- it was based on what I liked, and that wasn’t enough. I needed something to back up my decision.

I was freaking out and I stopped painting. I felt like I didn’t know what I was doing. I was lost. Mel Bochner -- a teacher of mine -- told me to just paint what I know. That simplified everything. It was months before I made a painting again, but then I started painting my name. Because I knew my name. I was going through a personal crisis - getting divorced - and things were falling apart. Then I started painting my address. And my studio number. Things I knew. Facts I could rely on. Old prayers I had to memorize in Day School. I was positive that these things existed. It was a way of working myself through an existential crisis. I could rely on these things. A yellow circle and a pink circle were meaningless but I knew my name.

Cute and Useless, 24 x 36 inches, Oil on panel, 2006And how did this early work evolve?

I was interested in born again religion/spirituality. I was taking a class on Hasidic Judaism in grad school. Looking at the art like revival. This minister Howard Finster -- he painted signs to get people to believe in Jesus. And having grown up in Texas I’m used to seeing Jesus shit everywhere. I just really liked the idea of a billboard that would speak to me personally -- so I was sort of painting my own billboards. What I wanted my billboards to say. I also like Marsden Hartley.

So you started to think more about color in that context?

Yeah.

How do you pick words now? Bananas, 72 x 72 inches, Oil on panel, 2007

It’s still the paint what you know thing. If you look at paintings from my most recent show, “Possibly Permanent” refers to the painting itself, to words, to me, to you... It’s coming out of an existential place. “Lines” refers to the formal aspect of a painting -- lines can come together to form a word or a star or just come apart to be abstract.

People (including me; see above) often invoke graffiti art in describing your work. What's the connection as you see it between graffiti and your word paintings?

Whatever.

Disaster, 60 x 60 inches, Oil on panel, 2007You’ve begun to explore the Star of David as a recurring symbol. What led you there?

I was interested in the idea that a word is made up of lines and becomes a symbol in itself. But there’s never an original, and same with a star. I like the idea that a star can’t be original. It’s a symbol that anyone can draw and have. There are finite ways of arranging lines into a star.

What are the challenges and rewards of trying to address such an iconic symbol? What are some pitfalls you'd like to avoid, and what's the ideal aim? How might people begin to see the star anew?

There’s a huge history of Christian art, but a relatively small history of Jewish art. And associations with the Star of David are pretty much lame and tired – like the Holocaust. I had a personal goal -- could I make a Star of David not look lame in a painting? Jewish art doesn’t have the same history as Christian art because you’re not allowed to render the image of a figure -- it’s sacrilege.

The Star of David -- no one knows where it comes from, what its origins are, for sure. Its earliest association with Judaism is believed to have been on King David’s shield -- the bolster/support behind his shield were these interlocking triangles.

What's the reaction been to the star paintings?Star of David, 72 x 72 inches, Oil on panel, 2007

Artists have been very excited about them. Dealers, too. People wanted to show them before they were done. This gallery in Belgium where I’m having a show in February -- in a city where there’s been a lot of religious tension -- are really excited about showing the stars. The harshest response has come from collectors. The stars have been slow to sell. One collector told my gallery that, though she thought the star paintings were beautiful, she was “too much of a self-hating Jew” to buy one.

Star of David, 72 x 60 inches, Oil on panel, 2007

My favorite of the stars are the orange and purple -- in the orange the star is really not immediately apparent; it’s revealed through brush strokes rather than color. And the purple is partially painted over. So it’s almost like you’re avoiding the most overt representation (the Israeli-flag-type of star, wham). Is that a commentary on “self-hatred”?

No, it’s about color field painting and form and the idea of lines coming together to make meaning and then falling apart into elements. And about the star as a symbol without there being one original. But I guess a person could psychoanalyze that.

Star of David, 4 x 7 inches (oval), Oil on canvas, 2007

You’ve been influenced by the color field painters, right?

I want to name my first son Morris after Morris Lewis.

So -- Rothko, Lewis, Reinhart, Franz Kleinz: Jews. Do you think it’s interesting -- out of this religion that frowns on representational images of the figure of man (whatever that may be) comes a group of painters who paint abstract blocks of color?

Morris Lewis was a genius. Underrated. A lot of stuff has been written about Rothko and Jewish philosophy. And I do think it’s interesting: the spirituality represented by those paintings. But there were a lot of non-Jews making abstract paintings too. Sort of like how there are a lot of Jewish writers, but writing isn’t a uniquely Jewish thing...

Of your first solo show, “What’s So Funny” (at Brooklyn Fire Proof gallery in Williamsburg, 2005), New York Times art critic Roberta Smith said: “She has gained enough access to her medium to make one curious about what will come next.”

Now, Smith has weighed in a second time: “Some shows have ‘back to the drawing board’ written all over them, and Dana Frankfort’s Chelsea debut is one... Ms. Frankfort has put down stakes where painting and language meet, but a greater effort is needed.”

Seems like she was invested in your career and is being extra harsh now. How do reviews affect you, if at all?

Reviews are very important, career-wise. And also, it’s nice to be a part of the dialogue. But I’m gonna keep painting either way, so they don’t matter in terms of whether I’m going to be a painter, you know? I’m not making paintings for anyone else. But in the art world people care about that shit.

These days I feel a lot more comfortable tossing out what is written. It’s artists opinions that matter to me; other painters. Those are truly whose opinions matter. Old professors, grad school colleagues. A small, tight group. First thing I do when I’m having trouble with a painting is call those people into my studio. The critics have their own agenda.

***

Got a spare twenty grand lying around? Buy a Frankfort! Contact Bellwether Gallery for details.

I wrote about this a couple of days ago on my own blog, but I think it's worth recycling for a wider audience.

Naoki Honjo is a Japanese photographer who uses a rather unusual technique to achieve unusual results. Using a "tilt shift" lens, Honjo's photos screw with your sense of focus and depth perception, fooling the eye into believing that it's looking at a small scale model. But it's not; all of these photos are of real, life-size scenes, taken from vantage points like buildings or TV cranes.

Horses

Station

Swimming pool

You can see more examples of Honjo's work online here, and tilt-shift photography by other people here and here. No doubt 'true' art lovers would consider his work hokey and gimmicky. I think it's cool as hell.

Among the 500 entries for the Blake Prize for Religious Art in Australia are a painting depicting Osama bin Laden as Jesus Christ and a statue of the Virgin Mary covered in a blue burqa familiar to Afghani women that lived under the Taliban. The outrage and the debate—if you can call it that—is predictably stale, because the anti- side if reflexively offended but also because the art itself isn’t good. I don’t know how some artists get away with claiming provocativeness to be the supreme goal of art, especially since—by these standards, at least—anyone out of ideas and marginally shameless can be provocative. If you’re going to get people talking, you should be able to answer them. Otherwise, stun their sleeping asses into woken silence. Also: how is this “religious art”?

Damien Hirst, the obscenely rich and famous British artist, is more complicated. His diamond-encrusted platinum skull was sold today for US $ 10 million. If you’ve ever seen Hirst speak, or even read what he’s said, it’s clear that he’s a performance artist, that the man’s responses to the (eagerly awaited) criticisms of his art are as much a part of the art, more so, even, than the inanimate spectacles themselves. The art never stops, and Hirst is clearly calculating, if not always consciously. The fact that richer he gets the better an artist he becomes is, as far as I can tell, a new one for history. Worse, weirder, is that if you try to protest, you add to it. 

A shtender bender!

Y’all have seen shtenders before. They’re basically lecturns used in synagogues, schools and homes to hold a siddur open in front of you while you daven, or a different Jewish book open for you while you study. It’s pretty straightforward. A shtender is s thing that’s nice to have, but not entirely necessary, since your two hands will work just fine.

But for those of us with a larger budget, (and by larger, I mean astronomical) there’s the Tree of Life Shtender created by artists David Moss and Noah Greenberg.
Oooh...Aaaah...: You can have one if you've got a good ten grand sitting around getting cold
The Tree of Life Shtender is a hand carved wooden shtender that is also a “compartmentalized treasure chest for all the ritual objects of daily, weekly and yearly use in the hands-on practice of Judaism.” Basically, the shtender has in it everything you need to practice the rituals of Jewish life. There’s a shofar and a havdalah set, an etrog box and a seder plate. Pretty much anything you need to carry out a mandated ritual is somehow integrated into the shtender. And when I said that it was hand-carved, I meant that someone painstakingly whittled this thing out of solid wood, leaving precise and gorgeous carvings of the trees and plants of Israel, including the seven species.

It is, truly, one of the most beautiful things I have ever seen. And it is the embodiment of practical spirituality. Moss and Greenberg took something base and practical, something that you could easily ignore because it’s so utilitarian, and they infused it with spirituality and art. They’ll even come to your synagogue or school and teach about art and text and spirituality.

Like I said, this is an extraordinarily expensive piece of artwork—but it’s not like a painting you’ll put on a wall. You’ll be USING this baby. Still, it’s a whole lot of money, and you essentially have to commission it because they don’t just make tons of extras to have lying around. But if you have the cash, this the kind of thing that your family will treasure for generations.

I used to live in Irvine, California, which is a relatively nice place that is also one of the cleanest and safest cities in the US. But I had a bizarre experience one day. I walked out to the dumpster in my complex to throw my garbage away, and saw a very small Asian man hanging out inside the dumpster -- there he was, just lounging on top of the garbage that nearly overflowed from the giant container. Dumpster Diving: Everyone's doing it.

At first I thought he was homeless, and that he had taken up residency inside the dumpster, and it felt very awkward to be throwing my trash out in someone's home. But then I noticed that he seemed to be well-dressed. He even greeted me, not in English, but in a way that made me feel as if he knew me, and so I threw my trash in (as far from where he was sitting as I could), smiled, and said, "Hey, nice to see you!" as if it were completely normal to find someone sitting inside my dumpster.

Later that week, the same thing happened, except this time it was a very small Asian woman sitting inside the dumpster, going through garbage. I tossed in my trash, which consisted, on this occasion, of some discarded notebooks and lots of papers and old bills.

Before I walked away, she crawled over to my rubbish and began going through my papers. She was excited to find the old notebooks, and I saw her put them into her canvas collection bag.

I was mad. It felt creepy to have someone going through my papers even if I considered them trash. It was my trash. The next day, I happened to look out my window and notice the same man and woman coming out of the apartment across from me. Howdy Neighbor!: There they go again.

They were my neighbors. They weren't homeless or "needy" -- not if they were living in a fairly nice complex. My neighbors were dumpster divers. To make matters worse, the woman was wearing a hat that I had thrown out.

Okay, fine, what's the big deal? It just feels weird! My neighbors shouldn't be going through my trash, carrying my discarded notebooks, and wearing my old trashy hats.

But perhaps they were on to something.

An article in the Guardian today talks about an electrician who was working at Francis Bacon's studio in west London 30 years ago and noticed the artist dumping rubbish. This guy persuaded Bacon to let him keep these few discarded paintings, diaries, photos, and other odds and ends. He kept it all, and last night, it was auctioned off as the "Robertson collection" (named after the electrician) for insane amounts of money.

According to Mr Ewbank [of Ewbank Fine Art Auctioneers and Valuers]: "This stuff is a little bit of history. If it weren't here, it would be gone for ever. We have a little bit of extra insight into him." Does he have qualms about selling paintings that were rejected, indeed deliberately mutilated, by the artist? "The best judges of art are not the artists themselves," he said. "The fact that these paintings were discarded does not mean that they are not of value. And he did say he regretted destroying so much of his work."

Dumpster Diving: Francis Bacon's London studio as reconstructed for an exhibit in Dublin.Does this feel wrong to anyone but me? I guess it's true that Bacon essentially gave Robertson his trash, but does the wiley electrician really have a right to capitalize off of a dead-artist's trash? Then again, there's the Kafka dilemma -- Kafka asked Max Brod to burn all of his manuscripts after his death. Brod, of course, did not honor his wishes, and for that we are grateful. But is this appreciation merely an indication of our own greedy and narcissistic impulses?

This week's featured artist, Jim Kaufmann, recently curated a collage show at the TAG Art Gallery in Nashville. A recent piece from his blog is below, followed by some of the work displayed at the show.

Pesce Withdrawn by Jim Kaufmann

Continue reading...

I and the Village, 1911Care to learn a little about the man behind the Chagall your temple Sisterhood’s so very into? Pick up a copy of Marc Chagall, the newest installment in Nextbook’s excellent Jewish Encounters series. Though he is perhaps the most famous, identifiable “Jewish Artist” in the world, Wilson quite skillfully provides a welcome antidote to our conventional, “lachrymose”, post-Holocaust, rampant shtetl-nostalgia, Fiddler-on-the-Roof bullshit Chagall associations, laying out a clear-eyed and fascinating look at the artist himself. Beyond being the dude forever, sadly yoked to flying rabbis, misplaced sentimentality, and lame synagogue art, here we find Chagall alongside Modigliani and Degas in Paris pre-WWI, Chagall the hardcore metro-sexual, given to wearing rouge, Chagall weathering enormous financial, political, and artistic setbacks, Chagall somewhat under-whelmed by Palestine in the ‘30s, and on and on. In Wilson’s own deft prose:

A book marking the vast contribution of Jews to the history of sentimentality, from the novelist Grace Aguilar through Al Jolson and Irving Berlin and on, let us say, to Barbra Streisand and Neil Diamond, has yet to be written. But in it Chagall would surely have his own chapter, not because his paintings are desperately mawkish (and after all, sentimentality is not the attribute only of weaker artists -- think of Dickens or Renoir) but because he walked the tightrope that separates sentimentality from deeper, more authentic feeling better than anyone, except perhaps the great Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai.

Those of you in New York have the opportunity to hear Wilson on Chagall tonight at Barnes & Noble in Chelsea at 7pm. Lucky you! And if you're not familiar with Wilson's ridiculously great fiction, you can't go wrong with his most recent story collection, the genuinely funny An Ambulance is on the Way.

Meanwhile, back in my former hometown of Boston, Joshua Glenn posted on the Globe's website today about a bizarre protest at the American Repertory Theater at Harvard this past weekend.

There's an interesting article in the Village Voice about commemorations of tragic events and the nature of memory and representation -- in the context of Latin American totalitarianism. The underlying question seems to be how we can/should use public spaces to bear witness to the tragedies of the past.

A word of warning to the victims of violence, the survivors of torture and forced disappearances, and the friends and relatives of those who perished in Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, and elsewhere in Latin America—beware memorials. They often become places where a culture isolates and entombs memory, only to walk away from it.

 The piece also highlights various Latin American artists' efforts at memorialization.The Disappeared: Guagnini's monument to his father, who disappeared when he was 11.

Other artists focus on forgetting, memory's inevitable corollary. The Colombian Oscar Muñoz paints fleeting portraits of the dead on stone, using a paintbrush dipped in water; on videotape, we watch the pictures begin to dry and disappear just moments after he has made them. And Nicolás Guagnini, whose father, a crusading Argentine journalist, disappeared when he was 11, has created a visually unstable monument to his father's memory: a series of columns imprinted with a high-contrast photograph of his father's face, which comes into and out of focus as you move around it. "My father wanted to change the world but his way did not succeed," Guagnini has said. "Through art I could make a revolution every day." Let's hope that he and other artists, in societies emerging from years of fear, get that opportunity.

Another Choice: Caplan's Rothko DesignsOkay, so I totally wimped out yesterday.  I think I was afraid to search for a “hip” kettubah because I feared that if I found one, and nobody else thought it was “hip,” I’d be branded as totally “unhip” forever.  But then a friend called me on my  bullshit, and so I spent a few hours last night hunting for the coolest Ketubah around. 

Guess what?  I actually found some things…. that don't look like synagogue windows.

These Ketubot by Jonathan Blum are really really different!  They’re essentially wooden frames, painted with YOUR likeness, and then the artist arranges for the parchment itself with a Sofer.  They have a kind of folk-art feel to them. I’ve never seen anything like ‘em!I Like: Blum's folk art frames

Another idea, as you hunt for the perfect Ketubah, is to sample a Jewish cultural tradition beyond your own.  It’s nice that we have Jewish art from all kinds of countries, a built in multi-culturalism from our diaspora.  I like this Persian design by Simcha Back.

If you scroll to the bottom of the page, you’ll find a few examples of Stephanie Caplan’s Rothko  Ketubot.  She has some other interesting stuff too, but I think these are great!

 If you really have money to spend, think about getting something special.  For a pretty penny you can have one of these made for you by Elsa Wachs.  Hand-embroidered on vintage fabrics.  Wow!

These papercut Ketubot  (designs by Archie Granot) are amazing. And anyone who doesn’t think so should try cutting paper sometime.  I’m not certain the effect comes through fully online, but these are pretty complex works of art. 

And Then There's This: For kissy JewsIn Nishima Kaplan’s gallery of designs, I found a lot of different kinds of things beyond the stained glass window style.  Here’s   one that looks like Klimts,“The Kiss”.  And Michelle Rummel uses similar Klimt-y inspiration.  I suppose where weddings are concerned, Klimt is to painting what Yehuda Amichai’s is to poetry.  But there’s a reason things get to be trendy…

These Ketubot are very plain, but they have a clean feel to them (you could never accuse them of looking like stained glass from the seventies), and the sofer(et) behind them sounds very very neat (she invented Tefillin Barbie!).

And last, but not least…

The Talmud Ketubah: Kicks it old skoolThe Design Lab offers these Ketubot, by Gad Almaliah.  I don’t know if they’re hip, but they appeal to me.  Plainer and pretty traditional, some with embossed metal around the text.  This one looks like a page of Talmud, and it rocks.  I don’t know… I kind of feel like… if you’re going to hit some tradition, hit it hard.   

So, although I could have looked at these things all night, that’s the word on “hip” Ketubot (for now).  But if you ever are really hunting for something different, backchannel me, and I'll see what I can do to help you search.

One last note… in my quest for a cool Ketubah, I stumbled upon this site.  It’s a blog where some folks collaborated on a Ketubah.  And I wanted to add that I think this is awesome.   I don't love the design, but I do admire the idea. 

For what it’s worth, if I weren’t married yet, I think I might try making my own, or asking friends to collaborate on something…  Or maybe stealing Jonathan Blum's idea, and making a frame, and then putting a plain Ketubah in the frame.  Or asking an artist who doesn't usually make Ketubot to build a one-of-a-kind frame for me.

I think it’d be a neat thing to surprise my husband with.  He loves old maps, and music and as I’ve been writing this post, I keep imagining the Ketubah frame I could make out of  an old musty map and faded sheet music…

Sculptor Cosimo Cavallero and his 6ft chocolate ChristCatholics are up in arms over a 6ft chocolate sculpture of Christ that will go on display in New York over Easter.

The work, called "My Sweet Lord," will be on view in a window of the Roger Smith Hotel's Lab Gallery on E. 47th Street. The sculpture is made of almost 200 pounds of dark chocolate.

According to the New York Daily News, because the statue is "anatomically correct" (which I think is shorthand for 'stark bollock naked') some Catholics believe it is in bad taste:

"It's an all-out war on Christianity," fumed Bill Donohue, president of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights. "They wouldn't show a depiction of Martin Luther King Jr. with genitals exposed on Martin Luther King Day, and they wouldn't show Muhammed depicted this way during Ramadan. It's always Christians, and the timing is deliberate."

Chocolate Christ sculptor Cosimo Cavallaro, who is himself a Catholic, said giving Jesus a loincloth would be "ridiculous."

"This person is talking from a very narrow window," he said of Donohue. "They're not allowing themselves to open their hearts. ... If it makes them feel better, I'll ask for their forgiveness and do 10 Hail Marys, but they should just lighten up and be more accepting of people."

CNN Says You Should Have Bought It Three Years Ago: Dave Choe's "City Girl"CNNMoney discusses the scary-fast rise of Jewcy's founding art director David Choe.

Barely three years ago, you could have bought the San Jose street artist's paintings for a few hundred bucks apiece. Now a Choe portrait will set you back as much as $50,000.

They also show one of Dave's pieces, "City Girl."

Boy, we’re shameless. For weeks on end Jewcy had Dave working frantically in the back office pumping out brilliant original pieces like he was chained to a worktable in Shenzhen and being paid by the dozen. We’re talking one good spark away from the Jewcy Shirtwaist fire. Why did he do it? As I said before, it’s because Dave’s a militant Jewcer: he believes in the cause. Kudos to Dave for the CNN coverage.

A Beautiful Mess: Dave Choe's AmericaBut here's something that makes me mad: the influential arts and culture magazine Juxtapoz recently featured Dave on the cover of an issue titled “David Choe: Fast & Dirty.” In the first sentence of the intro to Matthew Newton’s interview with Dave, Newton summarizes Dave’s work this way:

“For the better part of a decade, David Choe has perpetuated a fast and dirty style of art that captures in feverish and frantic detail the ills of a crumbling and decadent America.”

I can forgive Newton for doing “adjective-conjunction-adjective” three times in one sentence. But I can’t forgive him for spreading the outrageous slander that Dave’s art is about “a crumbling and decadent America.”

Dave’s art is a feckin’ lovesong to America. I saw him in L.A. a couple weeks ago and we talked about his mixed media painting "My American Dream". Everything you need to know about how Dave feels about America is there. Yes, America (like the flag) is twisted and misshapen, sloppy, compromised, and not true to its self-image or the image it presents to others. And yet in all that messiness he sees a culture roiling with hybrid vigor, a sloppy unconstrained mongrel mess that Dave loves, and to which he’s the ultimate native."The Ills of a Crumbling, Decadent America": The Juxtapoz Dave Choe covers

All this is evident in his art, but I also know it’s true because I’ve known him since I was just a little tot and his grandmother swore at me in Korean for eating all the dried seaweed, which I did do, but in fairness I had never eaten seaweed before so I was understandably intrigued. The point being that I know Dave’s art better than anyone, so if you think my understanding is faulty, Occam’s razor tells us this is because you’re wrong.

So Juxtapoz, keep that tired “We’re artists, so we think America sucks, society sucks, cuz artists are like that” shtick for yourself, don't try to push it off on Dave.

Ivy RedHawks builds his sets himself

Ivy Red: Photo by Aaron HawksI shot with Aaron Hawks a few years ago in San Francisco. I posed in a torturous corset, alternately sprinkled in flour and dowsed in ice water, in Hawk’s freezing cold loft. It was the most brutal shoot I’ve ever done- and I’m insanely proud of the results.

Hawks shoots with film, in room sized sets he constructs himself. His work, darkly fetishistic, is objectifying in the best sense of the word- turning the human body into grist for his disturbing visions.

I’ve never been good at high-art thinky thoughts, so I’ll let this man’s work speak for itself. Check it out.

Moths

Jellyfish Girl

For not always rational reasons, digital art feels like cheating to me. Your eyes ache but your hands don't dirty. There's no final object, no wrangling with coloured mud.

Where crows come from: Art by Jason Levesque Yet, Jason Levesque is one of my favorite artists, digital or otherwise. His work has appeared on the covers of computer design magazines and in international, high art glossies. Dan Savage even had to defend his Dig cover once. Jason's work is a tribute to the eroticism of biology, in all it's wierd, decaying, mucous-ey glory.

If you never thought that scarecrow guts or jellyfish were sexy, think again.

If only he were as hot as she is: The Veiled Bride, by Simeon Solomon.I’ll always maintain that Wilde was no homosexual martyr. Thinking his celebrity would protect him, he brought the Marquess of Queensbury’s lawsuit upon himself. Even his “Love that dare not speak its name” speech spoke about an attraction between men that was both chaste and intellectual -- and had no relationship to his dealings with London rentboys.

A much more genuine martyr to decadence is Simeon Solomon, an 1890’s British pre-Raphaelite who’s career was cut short by his repeated arrests for sodomy. The Simeon Solomon research archive keeps his humid, elaborately detailed, lush lipped work this’away…

SkintimatesStigmaYou're My FlameLate into the night on G-chat, me and artist Genevive Zacconi bitch about our hair and the gallery world in equal measure. Her constant refrain is that very few people understand her conceptual, classically painted art.

So, Jewcy readers, here's your chance to prove your superiority to art world movers and shakers. Tell me what Genevive's work means.

And no, it's not a wombat.

• Photo courtesy evildunkingrl87 at DeviantArt.ComU.S. Marine Corporal Matt Sanchez has exhausted a least a few of his nine lives in the past few years. What with racially charged lawsuits, being the Conservative Party's Last Great White Hope, and that sticky gay porn scandal. Did we mention he also is out promoting his new book? When's this guy have time to be a student? [IvyGate]
• Speaking of artistic kiddie porn ...When did Ivy League college students aspire to be like the models for the centerfolds inside any random copy of The New York Times Style Magazine? [IvyGate]
• At least some recently appointed person of influence/influential policymaker in Massachusetts is taking her appoinment seriously. [FOX News]
• Freedom of internet expression sabotages high-power career of recent Yale Law School grad. I guess she shouldn't have posed for those smutty pictures, huh? Even if they did put her thru school. [Concord Monitor]
• The "Decorative Expressions of Love in Various Media" exhibit hits the Yale Art Gallery roughly a month late. Then again, it's never too late to care, right? [Hartford Courant]

 
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Purim sameah to all! Peace from Israel 

[Every Tuesday, Jewcy's Art Director Michael Morlitz will post an image with commentary to visually spice up the Daily Shvitz. This is his first installment. Cutesy title for this series forthcoming.]

Apparently, this is what they do for fun there, so count me in! The website says: The rules are simple: I put the self-timer on 2 seconds, push the button and try to get as far from the camera as I can.

Plaszoom, Rotterdam

Wijnstraat, Dordrecht

There's a lot of pictures, but it's hard to tell if he's running fast or if he's a slowpoke. I bet he's speedy quick though. He only has two seconds!

"Eclipse of the Sun": Grosz's thoughts on Hindenburg, etc.Laurel Snyder's Faithhacker post about Jewish artists reminded me that I’d been wanting to comment on the Met’s terrific exhibit, “Glitter and Doom.” It’s a retrospective of Weimer impressionism, featuring the works of Otto Dix, George Grosz and Max Beckmann – without whom David Lynch is pretty well unimaginable.

I doubt I can improve on Ian Buruma’s excellent essay in the New York Review of Books about the paradoxical lure and repulsion of Germany’s brief Second Reich. Suffice it to say, a thin veil of decadence was draped over a ravaged society reeling from horrors of the First World War and well on its way toward the Second. Art cleverly (if scandalously) inverted this effect by embellishing the pathological the expense of the decadent. The central tropes here were not far removed from those of our own Gilded Age, plus sex. Blimpish, cigar-chomping tycoons; frivolous bourgeois playing cards or cutting a rug; graying Prussian aristos selling themselves and their country; hideously mangled and prosthesis-patched veterans; and whores – whores everywhere you turned.

Grosz was a rara avis, even for such a vertiginous time. He changed his name in 1916 to from Ehrenfried Groß out of an abiding enthusiasm for America, derived from his reading of James Fenimore Cooper (his judgment on the canvas far outmarshalled its counterpart on the page).

Through A Glass Darkly: Otto Dix's prostitute themeSomething of a Luxemburgian socialist by nature, he was arrested during the Spartakus uprising – or abortive German revolution – of 1919, the same year he joined the Communist Party. Five months in Russia was all it took to disillusion him on this sordid affiliation. After adding more than his fair share to the prevailing Weimar aesthetic, he hopped it for the states shortly before Hitler became Chancellor, an eventuality Grosz and others of his set saw coming.

If you’ve read Isherwood’s The Berlin Stories, or perhaps seen Cabaret, you know about the whistled nihilism of the German twenties. Don’t think we’re quite “over” that decade’s cultural impact just yet. I remember being equally amused and shocked to discover in Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind the true origins of the song “Mack the Knife,” whose shark teeth were so winningly yanked out by Louis Armstrong in his pop standard of 1954.

This cheery, Anglicized jazz number, used to great effect in closing scenes of Quiz Show, was composed by Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill for their Threepenny Opera, which is now in revival on Broadway with ex-Cabaretman Alan Cumming in the lead role. Mackie Messer was a character based on a highwayman in John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera. He fatally slashed those who failed to pony up. Sort of a Natural Born Killer before his time.

"Cain, or Hitler in Hell": Grosz saw Nazism coming