From Khelil: "Of course, by now we are
used to the 3-day trip to some Arab country with no sense of humility by the
visitor on the partiality of knowledge they have, to put it mildly. So why not
play art critic? So that Zionist fanatic and racist Noah Feldman saw fit to
write about Arab art without any background. Here are some gems:
"the Gulf has essentially
no indigenous tradition of visual or plastic arts."
"The region's
noncontemporary art is similarly unchallenging." Here he is referring to only
the royal museums he visited but feels qualified to generalize.
"Orientalism may
potentially be controversial—except the emirs see it as a valuable window into a
vanished Arab and Islamic culture, not an out- growth of colonialism." Evidently
he is giving his definition that Orientalism is a by-product of colonialism when
Said's criticism, of course, was that it was integral to it and not
after-the-fact, that it was those representations that influenced
practices.
And a man who served in
the colonial government in Baghdad feels entitled to offer this: "The same
Jacques-Louis David whose The Death of Marat lionized the Jacobin ideal of the
French Revolution went on to glorify imperial rule in The Coronation of
Napoleon."
"In June 2012, angry
fundamentalists rioted in the upscale La Marsa neighborhood of Tunis over a
group show in which some pieces were allegedly insulting to Islam. The works in
question did not refer to the Prophet. They were, rather, critical comments on
Salafi fundamentalism—that is, on the very people who took offense." He's too
lazy to do a minute search online. The reason for the riot was the spelling of
Allah (in Arabic) with flies, which are referenced in casual speak as being
dirty. And does something have to reference the Prophet to offend
Muslims?
On Egyptian revolutionary
wall paintings he says: "may have marked the first time in Arab history that the
visual arts had a major impact on public consciousness." Of course, this is bull
shit. He should read the new book by Ziad Fahmy "Ordinary Egyptians." and the
book by Joel Gordon "Revolutionary Melodrama." But, I guess, books are
boring."
