Sharon Waxman: Through the Looking Glass, Backwards |
| Published: September 19, 2007, 7:17 pm |
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It takes a lot to interrupt my writing silence, but today's article by Kim Murphy in the L.A. Times makes it necessary. Kim managed to gain access to the basement of Iran's contemporary art museum where, she informs us, the most important collection of impressionist and modern Western art outside the West is stored, though not exhibited. Instead of showing its Picassos, Kandinskys, Pollock, Gauguin, Matisse and Braques, the museum has an exhibit of women's clothing and local paintings like one of a small bird facing three large ones titled, "Negotiations." Here is the flip side of the restitution debate -- the blinkering of the public to enforce a particular cultural identity, the desire to assert an acceptable, native culture and to exclude the dominant Western one. Art is lost along the way. Cultural exchange -- the point of this collection, started by the shah who was toppled in 1979 -- is the loser. It is another aspect of the same contentious theme, cultural schism, as involves [ Full article ] |
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