Our annual meeting this year is distinguished both by its large number of participants and by its intellectual breadth and depth. To me these indicate, as I will be discussing a bit later, that Middle East studies as an academic field, and MESA as the pre-eminent professional organization in that field, are flourishing. But this annual meeting is, I would suggest, also significant because this year, for the first time since 1989, we are meeting outside the United States.

The Association for Modern and Contemporary Art of the Arab world, Iran, and Turkey (AMCA) is a private, non-profit, non-political, international academic organization. Our goals include initiating the much-deserved recognition of a neglected and misrepresented field, and to open up institutional spaces for discussion, research and study. We seek to connect artists, scholars and others from around the world by sponsoring conferences, holding meetings, and exchanging information via a newsletter and website.

In a 2002 lecture at Home Works, Beirut’s contemporary art festival, writer and cultural critic Abbas Beydoun claimed that Lebanon’s internationalism had led to derivative cultural production. The well known critic’s comments evoked an angry outburst from members of his predominantly Lebanese audience of young artists and cultural workers. To varying degrees, however, this characterization of Beiruti culture repeats and prefigures descriptions of the city as a meeting point between East and West. Indeed, Beirut’s reputation as a multi-linguistic and cross-cultural Mediterranean port is traced to the latter half of the nineteenth century when the city became the capital of an Ottoman province and followed as a regional center for missionary, political, and cultural activities. Moreover, Beydoun’s characterization did not always carry such a negative connotation. This paper begins to trace the ways in which the visual arts is a field for producing, rather than reflecting, Beirut’s cosmopolitanism. To do so, I look at two historical moments pivotal in the institutionalization of the visual arts. The first is that of Daoud Corm (1852-1930), the city’s first professional easel painter whose career ran from the Ottoman period through the French Mandate (1920-1943). The second is the decades of the 1960s and 70s, the city’s heyday as a regional cultural capital when a number of artists and activists established a gallery system, further expanding the private sector’s consumption of painting and sculpture.

This paper is born of two somewhat separate but interrelated concerns: the oft-repeated assertion that there exists no history of art criticism in Egypt, and the greatly felt “absence” of an archive, an organized system of collecting and cataloguing dedicated to the fine arts in Egypt. It is with these two concerns in mind that I propose we approach the journal Sawt el-Fannan (The Voice of the Artist), for it was in response to these perceived shortcomings that this publication—a self-proclaimed pioneer in the field of Egyptian art criticism–was first produced in 1950. Despite the thriving Egyptian art scene of the time (or what is repeatedly referred to by journal contributors as al-nahda al-fanniyya al-haditha), such a movement was seen to lack a certain credibility and effectiveness, of being in danger of a short life in the absence of the appropriate reflection, recording, and documentation. In other words, the establishment of Sawt el-Fannan took place with a great sense of urgency on the part of contributors that reflects much of what was seen to be at stake in the existence of a modern art scene in Egypt. Therefore a close examination of the editorial vision behind Sawt el-Fannan is an important departure point for understanding the ways in which art criticism was being imagined during this period. By delineating the parameters of what Sawt el-Fannan considered to be this field known as “art criticism” or al-naqd al-fanni, we can begin to identify some of the functions it was expected to fulfill, and by extension, begin to address the place and function of art in Egypt at the time. I want to suggest that through its expansive understanding of its field, Sawt el-Fannan produces a complicated and multi-faceted relationship between artistic production and art criticism, one in which its role is both reflective and productive. As will become apparent, the notion of “taste” or al-hassa al-dhawqiyya is central to the objectives of Sawt el-Fannan; what such a publication is ultimately invested in are the wider discourses involved in cultivating a bourgeois artistic awareness and aesthetic sensibilities, what Bourdieu would call cultural competence, as part of the larger project of constructing the modern subject in Egypt.

This paper examines several historical and political contexts in which connections have been forged between modernity and identity in the field of Baghdad’s twentieth century architecture and urban space. Given that for some Iraqi critics, historians, or professionals, “westernization” is embedded in “modernization” and even to a certain extent in modernity, I’ll attempt to define the ways and the limits within which architecture and urban planning or urban space in Baghdad have been deployed in the different narratives of affirmation of an “Arab” or “Iraqi” identity.

The terms “Islamic” and ‘Arab” are not ideal instruments for classifying modern or contemporary art, for they are meta-categories that can variously encompass Muslims and non-Muslims, and Arabs and non-Arabs. Nonetheless, as historians of modern art in Islamic regions, we seem to have inherited a longstanding commitment to Islamic art as an epistemologically unique practice that produced limitless abstract patterns and other “non-Western” visual expression. It is time to move beyond such overburdened lineages. In this paper, I aim to historicize the formulations of a specific Arabo-Islamic aesthetic that emerged in the 1970s. I do so by a study of a single event and its metacultural claims: the World of Islam Festival held in London in 1976. The Festival projected optimistic countercultural options for art and civilization that remain instructive today, while the complexity of its organizing structures demonstrates the limitations of the West/rest paradigm in interpreting its artistic products.

Every summer, cultural festivals take place all over Morocco, and streets in towns and cities become animated scenes for the articulation of Moroccan contemporary culture. So animated, heterogeneous and pluralistic has this festival scene become that the semiofficial newspaper for the Islamist PJD party has called these street festivals “vectors of decadence” and performing-artist union officials have declared that they feel threatened by the “foreign invasion” of internationally-based diaspora groups. Recently, in a critique of these attitudes, the magazine Telquel reported that they are “sick of the wet-rags of the festival season” that deny “millions of happy festival-goers the occasional…free oasis in the grand cultural desert of Morocco.” Describing the street as an oasis of culture vis-à-vis the desert landscape of Moroccan cultural institutions is not a new trope. In this paper I explore how Moroccan artists have engaged with the potential, promise and problems of art in the street when gallery spaces and museums fail to integrate modern art into a wider Moroccan cultural landscape.

Leaders of Arab art institutions are negotiating new grounds for the arts with new money, new audiences, and—in the case of the Gulf countries—also new locations. They are playing a key role in devising alternate strategies to reach audiences and create civic dialogue through the arts, while negotiating economic, political, and artistic concerns that are helping to shape future cultural policies in the region. This paper explores the institutionalization of Arab art practices in Jordan, Lebanon, Palestine, and the United Arab Emirates, and the relationship of these arts organizations to their audiences. The reasons for selecting these four countries is that compared to other Arab countries, they have a large number of individual art initiatives, as well as new and diverse types of institutions. Each country has a specific context in which the art organizations were established and function. However, the focus of this paper is the relationship of the art institutions to their audiences and the strategies they use to encourage discourse on art and its content in the public sphere. The paper is based on discussions with twenty-one art professionals who represent almost all leading art institutions in the Jordan, Lebanon, Palestine and United Arab Emirates (UAE).