Dubai Culture Village
As I was wandering around (in the vicinity of Trader’s Hotel, if anyone cares), I saw a huge billboard for Dubai Culture Village.
It depicts a scene with the usual Dubai assortment of people in Western business outfits mingling with people in abayas and dishdashes, all standing in an art gallery featuring original (copies of???) European Renaissance paintings. The billboard is deliberately blurred, but it is still possible to make out the paintings being depicted, and they are similar to ones that sometimes appear in the Arts section of the European newspapers on sale in the Emirates. Only, when the paintings appear in the newspapers, they are invariably covered with the censor’s black ink, since the censor is convinced that representational art is “inconsistent with the religious, cultural, political and moral values of the United Arab Emirates.” (Especially when the art represents such things as odalisques.)
Will Dubai Culture Village be a free zone where European representational art is allowed?
It depicts a scene with the usual Dubai assortment of people in Western business outfits mingling with people in abayas and dishdashes, all standing in an art gallery featuring original (copies of???) European Renaissance paintings. The billboard is deliberately blurred, but it is still possible to make out the paintings being depicted, and they are similar to ones that sometimes appear in the Arts section of the European newspapers on sale in the Emirates. Only, when the paintings appear in the newspapers, they are invariably covered with the censor’s black ink, since the censor is convinced that representational art is “inconsistent with the religious, cultural, political and moral values of the United Arab Emirates.” (Especially when the art represents such things as odalisques.)
Will Dubai Culture Village be a free zone where European representational art is allowed?
posted by Dubai@Random at 1:54 am
1 Comments:
I'm now imagining the black-texta guys reclothed in artists' smocks, with their black felt-tip pens swapped for buckets of paint and huge wide paintbrushes, as they merrily blacken out anything haram from all the great masters.
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