by Jon Lackman | 13 October 2010 | Conferences, Islamic
From The National (Abu Dhabi):
[A panel] hosted by the British Council at the Sharjah Museum of Islamic Civilisation … struggled to reach a conclusion as to the nature of what defines Islamic art … [Emirates Foundation arts director Salwa Mikdadi] said the theoretical framework of Islamic art had been defined by the West. “The imposed categorisation of art in the region is new to me. In the 1970s [artists] were all just Arab, then they were defined by their countries and then by their religion … Auction houses like Christie’s and Sotheby’s have more influence on what is Arab and Muslim art than any researcher because we don’t have museums or art historians to provide other discourse.” … Elisabeth Kendall, a senior research fellow in Arabic and Islamic Studies at Pembroke College in Oxford, said it was important only to recognise the framework within which artists were working … “Throughout history, art has taken elements from the different traditions it has encountered and we can choose how we define our artists as long as we always recognise the process it takes to get there.”
This recalls Oleg Grabar’s 2008 review of History and Ideology: Architectural Heritage of the “Lands of Rum,” edited by Sibel Bozdoğan and Gülru Necipoğlu:
[The book] argues that the adjective “Islamic” is not appropriate for the arts and cultures of many different places and times, and that it was imposed, or at least propelled, by the “bad” Orientalism, the one that implied Western domination and that must be differentiated from the “good” Orientalism based on a careful knowledge of languages and of history.
