THE SPINE NOVEMBER 28, 2010
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It’s not a particularly big thing. But it is ironic that it is Arabs who are undermining Professor Said’s thesis.
I commented on this in ABRACADABRA, a Saturday SPINE. And then I had follow-up thoughts.
Who has been driving up the prices of 19th century Orientalist paintings at the auction houses? Well, you got it: wealthy Arabs and especially the Arab royals.
Even the Western art world can’t ignore the trend—to wit, the Gérôme revival, to which the Getty just recently gave a very big lift:
http://www.getty.edu/art/exhibitions/gerome/
Plenty of scenes of muezzins, public prayer in mosques, snake charmers. All that you didn’t have at the Getty were tableaux of whirling dervishes.
The Getty exhibit was subsidized by the Federal Council of the Arts and the Humanities. And it also being shown at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris and the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid.
Poor Said, barely cold in his Lebanese grave, and already repudiated by his own.
And why Lebanon?
4 comments
Well, ironically, the mural done in his honour at SFSU is pretty much an Orientalising of Said himself. http://www.mylifedump.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/11/mural-final-photosmall.jpg Especially the Arab-dressed debke dancers and Al-Aksa and the olive trees in the background. Said was reputed to be a rather dandyish dresser. I don't think he would agree to be seen alive in a kefiyeh. Far too oriental and obvious, maybe. It's funny how his memorializing him had to be done through Orientalizing him. It's actually the greatest refutation of his theory.
- noga1
November 28, 2010 at 4:54pm
It would be interesting to know precisely how the buying-up of 19th-century paintings by Arabs in 2010 refutes Edward Said's _Orientalism_... In fact, this is another Peretzian hissy-fit over the spanking that Said gave him in _Covering Islam_.
- SMacEachern2
November 28, 2010 at 5:59pm
"In fact, this is another Peretzian hissy-fit over the spanking that Said gave him in _Covering Islam_." What a hypocrite MacEachern is. Had Peretz written about Said what Said wrote about Peretz MacEachern would have used that as evidence that Mary was a bigot. In other words no matter what Peretz says is bigoted and what said says is merely a spanking. Another example of Said inspired bigotry. I suppose that MacEachern too would go to Hezbollah controlled territory in Lebanon order to throw stones at the Israeli border just as Said did.
- jdyer
November 28, 2010 at 6:37pm
Edward Said was the P.T. Barnum of Middle East studies, an utter fraud with showman's instincts who succeeded in gulling wave after wave of sycophantic academics, with nary an original thought of their own in their heads. Of course they're gobbling up 'Western' depictions of Middle Eastern culture. They've been doing so since the Sultan commissioned his portrait from Bellini: http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/server.php?show=conObject.2466
- roqabs
November 28, 2010 at 8:20pm