Israel Museum Returns WWII Looted Art
July 3rd, 2008 by Menachem Wecker
And re-purchases two of the three 1,700-year-old Roman golden medallions for an undisclosed sum.
A Different Kind of Face Paint
July 2nd, 2008 by Menachem Wecker
Meet Chinese artist Zhang Huan. There is said to be a Buddhist angle to his work, but good luck uncovering it.
Biblical Art at the Tel Aviv Museum
July 2nd, 2008 by Menachem Wecker
My colleague Richard McBee reflects on three biblical works. Money quote: “Let’s ignore what the artist says and just look at the sculpture.”
Gentileschi’s “Judith and Holofernes” at MFA Bilbao
July 2nd, 2008 by Menachem Wecker
The artist himself had a series of run-ins with the law for sex crimes.
OBIT: Hamilton Southam, 91
July 2nd, 2008 by Menachem Wecker
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.”
Met’s St. Michael Relief Falls, “Serious Damage”
July 2nd, 2008 by Menachem Wecker
Story here. Image (pre-fall): Artdaily.org
Curator: Brooklin Museum Owns 10 Fake Christian Sculptures and Reliefs
July 2nd, 2008 by Menachem Wecker
Report David Usborne for the Independent (UK) and Martin Bailey for The Art Newspaper. Edna Russmann, a curator at the museum, went public with the news and hopes her admission will lead other to “re-evaluate Coptic art.”
Usborne explains that Coptic art is “Christian imagery in limestone from Egypt dating between the late fourth century and AD641.”
The Wiki page adds, “Coptic art displays a mix of native Egyptian and Hellenistic influences. Subjects and symbols were taken from both Greek and Egyptian mythology, sometimes altered to fit Christian beliefs. Persia and Syria also influenced Coptic art, though to a lesser extent, leaving images such as the peacock and the griffin.”
Leonardo’s “Last Supper”: The Film
July 2nd, 2008 by Menachem Wecker
Peter Greenaway calls his cinematic addition a “dialogue” joining “113 years of cinema and 8,000 years of painting.” (More colorful story here)
Indonesian Curator Gets 18 Months in Jail
July 2nd, 2008 by Menachem Wecker
K. R. H. Dharmodipuro secretly sold six ninth-century Hindu statues and replaced them with fakes.
“Historical Treasure Trove” Stolen from Minn. Archbishop John Nienstedt
July 1st, 2008 by Menachem Wecker
The thieves took “valuable rings, crosses, and other religious items.”
A “Modern Entrance” to Jerusalem
July 1st, 2008 by Menachem Wecker
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.
Artistically Deconstructing the Bible
July 1st, 2008 by Menachem Wecker
In Berenice Rarig, missionary means artist. (RNS)
An Ultra-Orthodox Jewish Reality Show
June 30th, 2008 by Menachem Wecker
Not American Idol, but the Israeli “Upcoming Voice.”
SAJA Hosts Live Webcast With Sir Salman Rushdie
June 30th, 2008 by Menachem Wecker
“In the Islamic world … the pen of a calligrapher has been referred to as the ambassador of intelligence”
June 28th, 2008 by Menachem Wecker
Says curator Alison Darnbrough, who was surprised to discover Pakistan has a “buzzing” art scene. But then comes the gross generalization that plagues so many articles on Islamic art:
While calligraphy was praised in the Islamic world, paintings were less so. This is because the religion forbids depictions not only of Allah and Mohammed, but of human figures.
I’ve dealt with this question in “Are drawing and painting haraam?” (in The Arab American News). It continues to surprise me that people, even educated curators and historians, write off a long tradition of representational Islamic art for no reason.
See an example here, where Mohammed sits in the top left corner, as an angel presents him with a map of the Holy Land. This patronizing nonsense about Islam being anti-art has to stop.
P.S. 1 Shows “NeoHooDoo: Art for a Forgotten Faith”
June 27th, 2008 by Menachem Wecker
The curator says the show “grew out of a desire to explore the multiple meanings of spirituality in contemporary art.” Story and photo (of Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ “Untitled” [Go-Go Dancing Platform], 1991) from Artdaily.org.
“Can a white Jew direct a play about struggles between black Britons?”
June 27th, 2008 by Menachem Wecker
Asks Raz Shaw, who spends “very little time” thinking about his faith.
Guy Ritchie Quits Kabbalah
June 27th, 2008 by Menachem Wecker
“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.
300 Iraqi Jewish Books Arrive In Israel
June 27th, 2008 by Menachem Wecker
They had been confiscated by Saddam’s secret police. “We bought them from thieves,” one Jewish collector said.
Kasparov Defends Museum that Criticized Religious Fundamentalism
June 27th, 2008 by Menachem Wecker
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.
RIP: Ed Arno, New Yorker Cartoonist
June 27th, 2008 by Menachem Wecker
Born Arnold Edelstein in Austria and a Nazi labor camp survivor.
“The complete absence of images is incompatible with faith in the Incarnation of God”
June 27th, 2008 by Menachem Wecker
“God has acted in history and entered into our sensible world, so that it may become transparent to him. Images of beauty, in which the mystery of the invisible God become visible, are an essential part of Christian worship. There will always be ups and downs in the history of iconography, upsurge and decline, and therefore periods when images are somewhat sparse. But they can never be totally lacking. Iconoclasm is not a Christian option.”
Thus, Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger in Spirit of the Liturgy (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2000), pp. 131-132. Quoted on The Charcoal Fire.
Kouichi Honda, Creator of “The Face of God”
June 26th, 2008 by Menachem Wecker
Who says you don’t have to be Muslim to enjoy Arabic calligraphy.
Art or Propaganda?
June 26th, 2008 by Menachem Wecker
In the New York Times’ blog, Paper Cuts: A Blog About Books, Barry Gewen reviews George Packer’s play, “Betrayed.” As he describes it, the play is about Iraqis who support the American invasion, but then are “broken on the wheel of bureaucratic and military cruelty” when they help the American occupying forces.
In the piece, which ran last April, Gewen writes that he was so swayed that “when the play was over, I wanted to rush out into the street, grab everyone I encountered by the shoulders and shout at them, ‘We’ve got to do something to help those people!’”
This leads Gewen to question whether the play has become something other than art:
There’s no question that “Betrayed” is propaganda — effective propaganda, to be sure, propaganda that rouses your emotions, propaganda on the side of the good guys. But does its message-y, agitprop nature defeat the possibility of its being anything grander?
Gewen seems to sense that he is treading on dangerous territory, so he poses the question to his readers whether they can think of works created as propaganda that have risen to the level of art. The comments are quite insightful. A Don Williams points out, “‘Propaganda’ comes from the Catholic idea of propagating the faith. Obviously, many of our paintings from the Middle Ages were commissioned as works of religious propaganda.” Other candidates mentioned in the comments include Dylan, Arthur Miller, John Dos Passos and Jack London.
I have often called work propaganda, but when I try to be honest with myself I find that it is often hard to separate effectiveness from propaganda, especially when I don’t want to believe what the artist is arguing. Part of me wishes Gewen would have done a better job of defining what makes something propaganda, but clearly he got the feeling from “Betrayed” that it was propagandistic. Maybe that’s the only way to separate art and propaganda–from the sort of taste it leaves in your mouth.
Prado: Goya’s El Coloso is a “Pastiche”
June 26th, 2008 by Menachem Wecker
And is stylistically “completely alien to Goya,” reports the Independent.
Was Michelangelo Calling for “Revolutionary Change” in Christian-Jewish Relations?
June 26th, 2008 by Menachem Wecker
Benjamin Blech says yes. I have my doubts. More to come on this when I have a chance to read the book.
Where Do Transformers Live?
June 26th, 2008 by Menachem Wecker
In this new building in Dubai no doubt. (The architect is Israeli.)
Pope “Does Not Wear Prada, But Christ”
June 26th, 2008 by Menachem Wecker
And is a “simple and somber man,” reports the AP.