East Meets WestWhy MoMA's new show doesn't help us understand Islam.

Remarks From The Fray:

[...] Calling someone "Islamic" has rather specific connotations in the current cultural moment -- driven by doctonaire religion, stuck in repressive political atmosphere, fundamentally opposed to artistic expression. This show suggests that "Islamic" can mean other things. I don't think it is reacting to a straw man, nor do I think the point is simplistic. [...]

Siegel I'm sure would be appalled, but it seems to me that there is a kind of devil's bargain between radical Islamic groups and various Western commentators: Islam is a thing. It is a very narrow thing that demands conformity, and deviation from said conformity is strictly verboten. Many parties use this logic to justify violence.

It seems to me that a show that splits up that elective affinity is both academically sound and morally compelling.

--august

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[...] Frantz Fanon wrote eleoquently about the problem of reestablishing cultural production, and not entirely optimistically. Artistic diversity requires diversity in funding, a degree of self-confidence on the part of artists and their patrons, and above all an established and reliably institutionalized framework for funding and exhibiting. That has not really emerged in any Muslim country that I can think of except Turkey, where it is quite new: until recently all artists were producing horrific neo-Stalinist busts of Ataturk. No wonder people have come to European countries.

To blame all this on the curator of the Met show is unfair. More importantly, it reflects real ignorance not only about the situation of high art in the so-called "Muslim world," but also of the history of the Muslim world and of artistic production in general.

--Theodore_Geisel

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I believe Siegel was arguing that the show started off with artists who were themselves composites of so many influences, especially Western, that it made no sense to describe them as representative of the Islamic world. These hybrid influences aren't "syncretic." They're cosmopolitan. It seems to me Siegel is saying there are more representative figures, still living in Islamic countries, who would be better test cases of how diverse contemporary--not historical--Islamic culture really is. [...]

--argonaut

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[...] I hardly think the fact these artists are showing in New York and Geneva rather than in Peshawar is evidence of their Westernization. [...] Artists invariably go where the money is. [...] To be sure, artists represented in the Moma show are members of a cosmopolitan class, operate in European languages, as well as Arabic or Urdu etc., and are influenced by contemporary stylistic trends in America and Europe. They aren't producing folk art. But all "high art" has that cosmopolitan characteristic. The idea of these artists as Westernized only makes sense if you think that the globalized high culture of today is itself "Western." This is precisely the idea that the curator is rejecting [...]

--Theodore_Geisel

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[...] The author hints at, but does not state, the end of his argument--that there may in fact be no Islamic art because there is in fact no secular Islam. The necessary distancing of faith and ideas is simply not there.[...]

--twangmonkey

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(3/16)

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