Middle East Art and Society

2550 Words6 Pages

Middle East Art and Society

This is how I feel when trying to understand art from nothing. The codes of communication, the means by which we understand language are not clear. Art is a language, but a symbolic one. I am trying to understand the reasons and the culture that produces this language. My learning plan, written a few months before we departed for our program, was focused in trying to understand the relationship between culture and art in the Islamic countries. An Islamic art definition that I have repeated before and as presented by Eva Baer is the following: "Islamic arts refers not only to the art made for Islamic practices and settings but also to the art made by and for the people who lived or live in lands where most-or the most important -people were or are Muslims, that is believers of Islam." (Baer: 1998) By this we understand an encompassing definition that refers to the arts of all Islamic cultures and not just related to the religion of Islam.

For clarity purposes of this presentation I will go country by country and I will show you the method that I followed. As well at the end I will share some of the conclusions I have drawn from this research.

According to my learning plan I was interested in understanding the relationship between culture, society and arts. In Turkey, we stayed in Istanbul for the most part, in this setting I chose to research in the history of the contemporary art of Turkey as well as the artist-craftsmen and their work. The art produced after the secularized republic and the main developments of its broader history concerning the Ottomans period and Islamic art. Some of my findings related to the effect of the secularization, in where calligraphy (once one of the most develo...

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