(via Four Questions About Contemporary Arab Art)
I admit to feeling crippled by the New Museum’s Here and Elsewhere show. As the first major show of art from the “Arab world” in a New York museum, it stirs a huge well of emotions and frustrations about a topic that needs volumes to unpack. To their credit, curators Natalie Bell and Massimiliano Gioni have done a solid job of bringing together a lot of important work, but there are many shortcomings in the recent renaissance of Arab art, and although many of the issues aren’t specific to this show, they are evident in it. This is an attempt to understand some of them.
