Discovering The Beauty
Of Middle Eastern Art

By Aaron Duffy

As an art history major at Washington University (St. Louis, Mo.) I've studied just about every age of art - Bronze Age, Italian Renaissance, Impressionism, Abstract Impressionism - but I am frank to admit that I knew next to nothing about Middle Eastern art. The notion that my comparatively extensive study of art would exclude the teaching of such a rich history amazes me especially as we search for clues to what's in the hearts and minds of the people who live in the

Middle East and how we might win them.

Nick Ruocco is all too familiar with America's ignorance of Middle Eastern art. The Director of Education at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City said, "I hope what people will realize is that one's view of the ancient world needs to be broader and wider. The ancient world, for people who even care to learn about it, is Egypt, then Greece, then Rome."

"Yeah, that's what I have always thought," I replied confidently.

"Well, what about the rest of the world?" Ruocco said. "Our culture wants to say that its roots come from Greece, and maybe Egypt before that. But there was a lot going on in the rest of the world."

I thought back to Art History 101 - surely I'd learned something about what was going on in the rest of the world while the Greeks were building the Parthenon. While I was thinking to myself, Ruocco continued:

"History belongs to the winners. The reality is that most history books we have, were written by authors that were trained in a Eurocentric tradition. For us, culture begins in ancient Greece. I could get in big trouble for saying this, but there is no better symbol of that than the MET (Metropolitan Museum of Art) itself. When you approach this building, when you are walking down 5th Avenue, what is it that we want you to think of?"

I suddenly became excited that he was actually asking me a question that I knew the answer to: "It is a very Neo Classical building", I said.

"Yes, we want you to think of ancient Greece. We want you to think of us as a continuation of the thinking and the ideas of the ancient Greeks. Go to any city in America and look at its court building. Look at its state capitols. Look at its city hall even. All of that is harkening to the fact that our view of culture came from what is often an idealized view of ancient Greece. The reality is that ancient Greece was not all that wonderful either. It was a culture based on war. It was a culture in which there was slavery."

As Ruocco went on about ideas like the importance of keeping a globe on your desk while you are studying history so you can keep everything in context, I began wondering, "What happened? Why haven't I thought about these things? Why haven't I been taught these things? Was I just not listening? Was I not interested? Am I interested now?" Maybe I just felt no connection to ideas about Mesopotamia, the Fertile Crescent, and Islamic tradition. Maybe Middle Eastern people are so different from me that I never bothered to notice that they existed before Desert Storm."

My little internal soliloquy was interrupted.

"We all want to know what happens to us when we die, right?"

"Yeah."

"So, each culture develops its own answer to that question," Ruocco said. "That answer is based on the experiences of that culture at that time and in that place. It is not a question of a right or wrong answer, but by studying the history of a culture you can figure out where that answer came from. That, to me, is one of the most fascinating things about works of art because so many works of art have to do with belief systems, the abstract, and what we can't see. When you begin to look at works of art in relation to belief systems and abstract ideas, you can realize that we are all trying to answer the same question and our responses make sense for where we are at that moment."

That sounded reasonable enough to me - Iraqis are humans just like Americans. We both think about death. But I am also interested in how works of art reflect power - whether it is religious or political.

"If you look closely at the art from the ancient Near East, you might realize that power wasn't all that different from power in our country today," Ruocco said.

What are the messages that the art tries to get across and what are the images that are used to convey ideas of power?

"When Bush or Kerry create a television commercial, what is it that they are trying to convey in those couple of seconds about their abilities and their powers and their authority? Look at an ancient monument of a king and you realize that the king was doing exactly the same thing. In that way, we are very much connected to those people who lived a thousand years ago or a hundred years ago."