In general, most of us don’t get to see a lot of real art. I mean, there are the pictures that our kids bring home from school that are covered in finger paint and, for some reason, noodles. But aside from that, most people’s homes have, at maximum, four paintings. There is one of the Kosel, one of a narrow alleyway that passes under a walkway, one of a cabin near a river, and one of either a vase of flowers or a bowl of fruit. Fruit and flowers are very pretty to look at, and even though you can technically go out and buy some actual fruit, after a while their beauty is totally eclipsed by their smell, and your kitchen is totally eclipsed by flies. But beyond that, we never really get to see art, because seeing art would require going to an art museum or a really rich person’s house, and frankly, most of us have better things to do.
Thankfully, there are people who have decided to bring the art to the masses, because the masses sure weren’t going to the art. For example, there is a company called “Art-O-Mat” that offers vending machines that sell miniature art pieces—paintings, sculptures, etc.—in tiny boxes.
“Ooh, a vase! You should get it! Um . . . A-1.”
“Oops.”
The idea, according to the company’s brochure, is “to give art lovers a chance to buy inexpensive art samples from vending machines around the clock.”
Because you know how it is. Sometimes it’s three in the morning, and you need a tiny painting now, and of course none of the art places are open. Maybe you just got a tiny couch and you need to hang something behind it, or perhaps you’re a teenager who was playing a made-up game downstairs after your parents went to sleep, and you put a smallish hole in the wall that you now need to cover with a painting. Like your mother is going to wake up and go, “Hey! We got five new paintings! I’m probably not going to look behind them or anything!”
So you go to one of these art machines, and you put in your dollar, and it spits the dollar back out because it senses that at some point someone folded it, so you stick your dollar in again, and then again, and then you try to iron it out by rubbing it against the edge of the machine, and then the machine finally agrees to take the money that you’ve been absolutely begging to give it, and you select a piece of art and . . . it gets stuck. Are they kidding you? There it is, dangling in front of the glass. And then there’s a big sign that says, “No shaking the machine,” so you get down and stick your hand up through the slot, and then your hand gets stuck.
But if you’re not the type of person who likes to wrestle vending machines and you prefer to deal with a person, you can also see a lot of art in restaurants. Some restaurants hang various pieces of art, based on the restaurant’s theme. For example, one pizza place that I’ve gone to seems to hang all of their old pizza-making equipment, and the theme that it screams is “PIZZA!” or rather, “EARLY-TWENTIETH-CENTURY PIZZA!” But the rule is that if you hang it on the wall, you can call it art. (My hat, for example, is art. So is my bath towel, my broom, my magnet that tells me what time Shabbos starts in a city that I don’t live in, my kids’ chore chart, and the sign that reminds me which direction to face when I daven at home.)
For example, I recently read an Associated Press article about a woman in New York City who went into a Scandinavian-themed restaurant and was struck by the décor. Literally. The article is titled, “Moose Head Hits Woman in Eatery.”
Doctor: “Where was the patient hit?”
Nurse: “In the eatery.”
But yeah, it was a moose head. A lot of people, for reasons that are unclear, like to hang the heads of animals that were killed for no good reason. You figure that since they’re a restaurant, they probably kill animals every day for good reasons, such as that they need to serve it to customers—or that it’s eating the food that they need to serve to customers. But they can’t hang those heads on the wall. No, they hang moose heads. That way the moose looks like, rather than being killed for sport, it died by attempting to run through the wall.
Anyway, this woman sat down under the moose head, which, including the antlers, was 3 feet wide and weighed 150 pounds, when suddenly it attacked her. To be fair, that’s the last thing you’d expect to have happen to you in a restaurant. It’s more the kind of thing you’d expect to happen to Sarah Palin.
It turns out that the woman is OK—or OK enough to sue the restaurant (also probably the moose) for negligence and, of course, causing embarrassment. Because you can be sure that for the foreseeable future, all her friends are going to be saying, “Hey, remember that time we went to that Scandinavian place and you clunked heads with a moose?”
Meanwhile, people are also bringing art to schools, if you can imagine. An assistant art professor at NYU had a miniature camera—about the size of a watch—implanted in the back of his head as part of an art project.
Now that’s not really something that most of us would do, but I do think I understand him. I hate it when I go places and forget to bring my camera. In fact, I would forget my head if it weren’t attached. So this guy attached a camera to the back of his head so he’d never forget it. And that way, if he finds himself at, say, his son’s Chumash play, he can stand up, face away from his son, and snap some pictures. It would also be a great idea for parents who need to keep an eye on their kids while driving.
Okay, so he can’t actually snap the pictures. As it turns out, the camera is on a timer, and snaps pictures at one-minute intervals, and then broadcasts them to some art museum in Qatar.
When asked why he chose the back of his head, as opposed to, say, his forehead, he said that it’s an allegory about the things we don’t see or the things we leave behind. Like he’s going to get a call from the people at the museum: “You know your briefcase? You left it behind. We can see it on your kitchen table.”
In retrospect, though, he probably should have just attached the camera to the back of a baseball cap or something.
Whatever. Hindsight is 20/20.
I’m guessing, though, that the exhibit is probably pretty disappointing. (And I’m not just talking about all the time that he has to spend plugged into the wall every day to recharge.) I know that, with me at least, most of the interesting things in my life happen in front of me, and if they happen behind me, I make sure to turn around pretty quickly. The only things that ever happen behind me are when I’m standing in front of my classroom writing on the board and my students take the opportunity, in the ten seconds I’m writing, to throw paper balls at each other, spill at least three drinks, and sneak out of the classroom. But unfortunately, NYU makes him wear a lens cap when he’s on school grounds, for the sake of the students’ privacy. So the only interesting thing to look at, at all, would be when he’s in a crowd, such as at a restaurant.
“Is that a moose head?”

Mordechai Schmutter is a weekly humor columnist for Hamodia and is the author of three books, published by Israel Book Shop. He also does freelance writing for hire. You can send any questions, comments, or ideas to MSchmutter@gmail.com.