ABOVE: Samia Halaby’s Palestine, from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River, (2003), on display in New York starting March 14 as part of the show “Made In Palestine.”

Given that a large swathe of the population cannot actually agree on what “Palestine” is, a travelling exhibit called “Made in Palestine” pretty much has controversy built right into the title. Bringing it to New York, which after all has the largest Jewish population outside of Israel and the most painful first-hand experience of Islamo-Arab terrorism on American soil, things are a little, shall we say, tetchy. But although the reception has been chilly from some quarters and downright hostile from others, the group of Palestinian artists have succeeded, we’re happy to say, in finally opening “Made In Palestine” as of March 14.

An interview with Samia Halaby, who is one of the organizers of the group, al Jisser (”The Bridge,” to symbolize increased communication between the West and the Arab world), is published in a story yesterday on Worldpress.org, and it sounds like it was quite an uphill battle to raise the funding needed to bring the show to New York. Although several of the artists in the show, including Halaby, have found mainstream success on their own, they seem to have found that as a group of “Palestinian artists” with fairly frank political axes to grind, that the major funding institutions suddenly seem to be washing their hair that day. Regardless of the obstacles to getting the exhibit off the ground, the art is what matters, and from the samples available on the website, it’s all over the map. But still, if you’re in the area, sounds like it’s worth taking a look.

LINK: Worldpress.org > The Art of Politics

ABOVE: This is not a depction of the Prophet Mohammed carved in stone on the walls of the U.S. Supreme Court. We repeat, you are not seeing this. This is all a dream.

We don’t want any trouble, OK? We just want to make our little post on this article from the Washington Times today about the fact that many museums and libraries contain artworks depicting the Prophet Mohammed, and no one has so far burned them down. Rodin, Dali, Blake, they have all at one time portrayed Mohammed in their work, albeit not in the deliberately provocative manner the European press has done with its crop of cartoons.

There is a stone carving of Mohammed in the frieze adorning the chamber of the U.S. Supreme Court, apparently (as not seen above, right?), and miniature carvings of the Prophet were not uncommon in 14th and 15th century Persia, where mystics carved them with obscured features so as to make them useless as idols. These things are now found with some regularity in larger museums, so the current furore over the infamous Danish cartoons is, as is so often the case, not over what was said, but how they said it. After all, if the Supreme Court can get away with it, it can’t be that badass.

LINK: Washington Times > Muhammad’s image subject of art in past

ABOVE: Detail from Esam Pasha’s Tears of Wax (2003), which will be part of a new show of contemporary Iraqi art opening this week in New York.

A New York gallery specializing in Middle Eastern art will open a new show of recent Iraqi art on Wednesday, Al Jazeera reports. “Ashes to Art: The Iraqi Phoenix” will show at the Pomegranate Gallery (which doesn’t even have a website - horrors!) until February 22. The exhibit is meant to highlight the work of Iraqi artists—some still in Iraq, others expatriate—confronting the country’s post-liberation reality.

After decades of tight government control over galleries and art shows that forced much of the Iraqi contemporary art scene underground or out of the country altogether, the ten artists represented in Ashes to Art say that even as the country continues to be wracked by sectarian violence, art is blossoming again, and the country’s artists are finally allowed to speak openly about the Hussein regime and its grim effects on Iraqi society.

LINK: Al Jazeera > New York to host Iraq art exhibition

ABOVE: Detail from Robert Mapplethorpe’s Derrick Cross (1985). A show of Mapplethorpe’s fleshy work was recently allowed to proceed in Cuba.

Last day of ADD abridged, we’ve had our share, drunk our fill, etc.

Canucks getting czech Nazi-loot? — A Canadian family is one step closer to reclaiming 140 paintings stolen by the Nazis when they fled Europe (and currently housed in Czech public galleries). Globe and Mail > Family wins battle in Czech court to reclaim art

Prude or Nude in Cuba? — Mapplethorpe show opens in Cuba after hurdling prudish commie censors. Miami Herald > A famously gay U.S. photographer’s work is exhibited in Havana

Islamic Art goes online — Moroccan museum to open online gallery to show off permanent collection of Islamic art. Morocco Times > Virtual museum on Islamic Art in Oudayas

See you Monday, all systems go as usual.

ABOVE: a gold crown, one of the Treasures of Nimrud, a trove of 8th or 9th century BCE jewelery, which was briefly misplaced in Iraq after the whole war thing started.

Whole lotta looting going on, it seems. (see: pretty much every post we’ve made in the past month.) In order to promote his new book, Thieves of Baghdad, Matthew Bogdanos, the US Army’s chief guy looking into the looting of thousands of priceless treasures from Iraqi museums after the fall of Baghdad, tells the world that a lot of stuff was stolen and we’ll probably never see it again.

According to witness reports, about 300-400 thieves made off with more than 13,000 items from the Iraq Museum’s collection (about 5,000 have been recovered). On top of the fact that it’s a cultural disaster, now various insurgent factions within Iraq are apparently using the artifacts circulating on the black market to fund their fighting. Bogdanos calls the thieves’ haul a “cash crop,” and estimates it’ll take decades to recover most of the rest of the antiquities. Oh, and the book was co-written with thriller writer William Patrick, so it’s probably totally hyped up like the Da Vinci Code or something.

LINK: al Mendhar > On the trail of stolen Iraqi art

ABOVE: detail from Javad Hamidi’s Still Life (1990), part of the permanent collection at the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art. The Museum is now showing its substantial collection of Western modern art for the first time since the Islamic revolution in 1979.

The Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art has opened a major show of Western modern art, Reuters is reporting today. In most cases, this is the first time the Iranian museum will be showing these parts of its permanent collection in 26 years, when the Islamic revolt against the Shah forced the museum of stash its substantial cache of European and North American art in its vaults. The show, called “Modern Art Movement” includes works from 1870 up to the late 1980s, by artists such as Picasso, Magritte, van Gogh, Miro, Dali, Warhol, Pollock, and others.

We’d love to be able to point you to the Tehran MoCA’s website so you can see what an impressive show this is, but it is experiencing technical difficulties at the moment, hopefully of the “someone spilled Pepsi on the server” variety, and not the “museum employees have been detained pending religious trial” kind. The Reuters story quotes a British expert who says that the Tehran collection is “clearly the most important collection of the art of this period outside of Western Europe and North America,” so this is a big deal on several levels.

LINK: Reuters > Iran puts rarely-seen Western art on display

ABOVE: The Louvre, left, announced yesterday that Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal has donated $20 million to fund construction of an Islamic art wing for the already sprawling Paris museum.

Two posts on the Arab world in two days: civilizations might be clashing elsewhere, but here at ADD it’s like one big Benetton ad, all feel-good inclusion and togetherness. They had that kind of day at the Louvre yesterday, as the museum announced a donation of US$20 million from Prince Alwaleed bin Talal of Saudi Arabia, to help build a new wing for Islamic art. The Louvre has some 10,000 pieces of Islamic art in its collection but rarely gets to show them, having cluttered up the place with old paintings already.

Bin Talal is one of the richest men in the world, worth an estimated US$21.5 billion. Given that he’s already ponying up almost a third of the total construction cost of the new galleries, it seems like he could probably pull the extra $47 mil from behind his ear if he wanted to, but perhaps that would be a bit ostentatious (ostentation, of course, being totally foreign to the Saudi royal family). Mario Bellini and Rudy Ricciotti are the primary architects, and their design, like the I.M. Pei pyramid, will partly submerge the structure underground, so as not to disturb the facades of the surrounding Cour Visconti, one of the Louvre’s two main courtyards.

LINK: al Jazeera > Saudi funds Islamic gallery at Louvre

ABOVE: the Ka’abah, the spiritual centre of Islam. German Artist Gregor Schneider’s plan to install a strikingly similar structure in St. Mark’s Square for the Venice Biennale were kiboshed by nervous organizers, fearing violent responses.

We finally read the first satisfactory explanation of the flap at this year’s Venice Biennale over Gregor Schneider’s sculpture, which was rejected by organizers at the last minute with sketchy explanation. Schneider said at the time that it was a political decision to cancel the display, and lo, he was right. The Art Newspaper published recently a look at the controversy over Schneider’s work Cube Venice 2005, which would have been a 50-foot cube draped with black fabric in St. Mark’s Square. In this sense, it would have resembled the Ka’abah, the physical centre of Islam in Mecca.

Fears of a terrorist strike in response to the work—Artforum wouldn’t have hated it that much, would they?—prompted the Biennale organizers to strike the work from their dance card. The part that makes it all so ridiculous, however, is that Schneider apparently did all his homework first, actually sending a colleague to Saudi Arabia to consult imams about the theological dos and don’ts regarding the Ka’abah. And they were totally cool with it, told him that nothing in the Quran forbids reconstructing an imitation Ka’abah in Venice or anywhere else. If only the terrorists could be so accommodating; a U.S. curator, who curiously refused to give a name, said that fundamentalists with bombs would probably not be interested in the finer points of Quranic interpretation, and so Cube Venice 2005 was shelved. It’s a reason. A bit of a cop-out, but it’s a reason.

LINK: The Art Newspaper > Art in the age of global terrorism

ABOVE: a painting from the exhibit “A Creative Merger: Lawyers and Artists.” It depicts lady liberty chained to the walls of a cell, with the infamous silhouette of an Abu Ghraib prisoner in the lower right corner. And it closely involves the Attorney General of California! Outrage!

As a staunch member of the “shameless liberal media,” intent on the “bashing of America” and all she stands for—you’re shocked, shocked!, right?—we must point out this particularly laughable and cripplingly lame effort to counter one exhibit of bad seditious art with a whole truckload of bad patriotic art. Move America Forward, a radical right pentagon-poking fan-club, is outraged at a display of “anti-American” art that was displayed as part of “A Creative Merger: Lawyers and Artists,” at the Calif. DOJ which included things like a painting of a map of the U.S. filled in with the American flag being flushed down a toilet, and which was indirectly supported by the Attorney General of California. Pretty trenchant social commentary, huh?

Well, MAF is mobilized, according to the Sacramento Union: they’ve made an open call for submissions of wholesome, patriotic, military-industrial-complex-appreciating artworks. The whole project really reeks of its own low standards here, we couldn’t really top it: [Quoted from MAF] “No artistic ability required - just put your heart & soul into showing how proud and grateful you are to be an American and to be defended by such an exemplary collection of young men and women serving in our U.S. military.” Then—”here’s the best part!” they burble—they’re going to show off the art at the AG’s office and then mail it all to Iraq…”along with shipments of coffee & cookies!” Huzzah! Get scribblin’, folks! America’s brave soldiers need coffee and cookies way more than a competent president or a coherent foreign policy!

LINK: The Sacramento Union > Patriotic Art Show to Rival Lockyer’s

ABOVE: works by Avner Bar Hama, a Tel Aviv art professor and sculptor. The current Israeli disengagement plan is inspiring conservative artists like Bar Hama, says the L.A. Times.

If the old adage that pain is good for art holds true, then the rainbow of suffering that is the middle east must be churning out some doozies. The L.A. Times says that the Israeli disengagement plan in the Gaza Strip, where thousands of Jewish settlers are currently being relocated—with varying degrees of resistance—by the Israeli government, has galvanized conservative Jewish artists, who are responding with critical works concerned with themes of home, freedom, and the fickle vagaries of political geography.

Politics aside—we’re just a bunch of WonderBread goyim, after all, unqualified and uninclined to kvetch about the legislative twitches and jerks of God’s Chosen People—there is something curiously stirring about right-wing art, much like finding a Komodo Dragon under your car: rare, kind of mesmerizing, and not totally welcome. The Times says that right-wing artists are getting more recognition as the political landscape churns, noting that Israel is “a country in which culture is dominated by the left.” Uh, dudes: culture is dominated by the left everywhere. That’s why they call it culture. Zing!

LINK: Los Angeles Times > Pro-Settler Israelis Stake Out a Place in Art

ABOVE: detail from Javad Hamidi’s Still Life (1990), part of the permanent collection at the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art.

Dr. Ali Reza Sami Azar, whose sudden departure from the directorship of the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art we noted in March (and misspelled his name*, we sheepishly add), has returned. The Art Newspaper has posted an interview with Sami Azar about why he left in the first place, and why he’s coming back. In Iran, the taste in art apparently swings conservative—shocking, we know—and Sami Azar had the ministry of culture breathing down his neck at every turn. Instead of putting up with it or compromising his curatorial vision, he decided to walk away.

His return, he says, can be credited to the community of contemporary artists in Iran who stirred up a ruckus with the minister of culture and asked the ministry not to accept Sami Azar’s resignation. The interview skips over the next part of the story—did the ministry ask him back? Did he retract his resignation after being persuaded by the coalition of artists?—but the ending seems to be a happy one. There’s a presidential election around the corner, however, and Sami Azar seems less than optimistic about the outcome.

(* - we used the spelling as it appeared in the Iranian newspaper, which seems, like, totally reasonable.)

LINK: The Art Newspaper > Interview with Dr. Ali Reza Sami Azar

ABOVE: detail from Ed Ruscha’s Flash, L.A. Times (1963). Ruscha will represent the U.S. at the Venice Biennale in June; the U.S. State Department and the NEA recently announced changes to the way artists will be chosen for international exhibits.

The U.S. State Department and the National Endowment for the Arts are striking a committee to choose artists to represent America And Her Interests at international biennales, The Art Newspaper reports. These decisions used to be made by a panel of NEA wonks funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts and the Rockefellers—there’s that name again—but both private funders decided in 2003 to send their oversize novelty cheques elsewhere. The selection process was thrown into chaos. Rending of clothes, fire falling from the sky, etc.

Well, no more. No one, according to this article, has any idea how the process will work, who will be on the committee, or how they will pay for the sandwiches and kool-aid at their meetings. But one State Dept. boffin said that they hope to have the whole process working in time to choose an artist to represent America And Her Interests at the Istanbul biennial in September, so they obviously intend to get cracking. Like all things at the State Department, the whole scheme is rationalized by saying it’ll improve relations with The Muslim World. Sorry kids, but a few Ed Ruscha paintings probably aren’t going to distract anyone in Baghdad from that whole invasion thing.

New panel to select U.S. artists for biennales

ABOVE: Two bracelets from the exceptional Nimrud Gold collection, which will be touring the world through 2010 to raise some money for the Iraq National Museum.

The Nimrud Gold, called the finest, earliest jewellery of the ancient world by people who know such things, will be going on a global roadshow to raise some money for the understandably cash-strapped Iraq National Museum.

The Art Newspaper reports that about 300 pieces of eighth-century BCE gold jewellery will make stops in Europe, North America, and Japan during its five-year tour, and is expected to raise more than $10 million for the Iraqi museum. The Nimrud gold was dug up from one of Iraq’s many non-Saddam-infested palaces in 1989 and has had a tough life ever since: in 1990, the gold and some accompanying ivory carvings were moved to a vault becuase of Gulf War I; a clearly-not-so-surgical strike during the 2003 invaion flooded that vault with sewage. The ivories are pretty much toast, but the gold just needed a good buffing. A small selection from the exhibit will be shown at the National Museum in Baghdad in July before opening in a yet-to-be-decided European venue in October.

The Art Newspaper: Iraq’s greatest treasure starts world tour in October

ABOVE: Sheikh Saud Al-Thani relaxes at home with a copy of the Audobon Birds of America, purchased for $8 million in 2000.

Sheikh Saud Al-Thani, who in the last few years was on the art-shopping spree of all time, has been arrested in Doha on allegations of misused public funds. Sheikh Saud was until February the Chairman of the National Council for Culture, Arts and Heritage in Qatar, the tiny, obscenely wealthy middle eastern nation which has been converting its plentiful oil money into one hell of an art collection. As Chairman, the Sheikh was responsible for keeping the country’s growing museums—there are five (five!) under construction right now—well-stocked with priceless objets from around the world.

Well, “priceless” wouldn’t exactly be the right word; while no one doubts the Sheikh’s impeccable taste, his talent as an acquirer, it seems, left something to be desired: namely, thrift. The Art Newspaper reports that he was in the habit of acquiring pieces at, oh, up to 113 times their appraised value, such as the gem-encrusted fly-swatter valued in the catalogue at £5,000 - £8,000, which he eventually bagged at a cost of more than £900,000.

So—and we’re just sayin’, is all—the Sheikh obviously isn’t so hot at the bargain shopping. But even in diamond-studded Qatar, throwing around that kind of dough draws attention, and so Sheikh Saud Al-Thani is under house arrest, hopefully swatting flies.

The article alludes to more of the Sheikh’s adventures in tomb-raiding and the possiblity of royal intrigue. Sounds like a John Le Carré novel waiting to be written.

The Art Newspaper — World’s Biggest Art Collector Arrested in Qatar