Creative Reckonings: The Politics of Art and Culture in Contemporary Egypt

Stanford Studies in Middle Eastern and Islamic Societies and Cultures

by Jessica Winegar

The Egyptian art world is the oldest and largest in the Arab Middle East. Its artists must reckon with the histories of ancient Egypt, European modernism, anti-colonial nationalism, and state socialism-all in the context of a growing neoliberal economy marked by American global dominance. At this crucial intersection of culture, politics, and economy, Egypt's art and artists provide unique insight into current struggles for cultural identity and sovereignty in the Middle East. This book examines the heated cultural politics in today's Arab world, and tells how art-making has become an unexpectedly central part of that. It offers a lively analysis of the battles between artists, curators, and audiences over cultural authenticity, cultural policy, public art in a changing urban Egypt, and the new global marketing of Egyptian art. The art world it shows powerfully exemplifies how people in the Middle East reckon with global transformations that are changing how culture is made in societies with colonial and socialist pasts.

Genres: Anthropology, Egypt, Politics, Theory, Art

416 pages, Paperback

First published October 11, 2006

Reviews

[Gillian · Rating 5 out of 5]

The good thing about this book is that it's not "about Art" it's about artists and their world, in this case Egypt.

For me the most illuminating thing about it was the way the writer lays out for us the neocolonial processes the "international art world" practices on the artists that work on the "fringes" - outside of Europe and America.

The book contextualises the discourses of "art" as practiced now in Western art academies, institutions and publications; it holds a mirror up to their pretensions of universalism and progressiveness and makes us scrutinise amny contemporary practices.

It's not really for people who are interested in "Egyptian Art" so much as it's for those who are concerned about how culture is practiced, promoted, processed and co-opted.