Dina Ramadan: Aug 14

Dina Ramadan:
A Taste for the Modern: Art Criticism and the Making of the Egyptian Bourgeoisie
Thursday, August 14, 2008 , 7:30 PM
New Museum, 235 Bowery
Free

Scholar Dina Ramadan discusses the journal Sawt el-Fannan (The Voice of the Artist)—a self-proclaimed pioneering publication in the field of Egyptian art criticism, first produced in 1950—as a departure point for understanding the ways in which art criticism has been imagined in Egypt. Through an expansive understanding of its field, Sawt el-Fannan has produced a complicated and multifaceted relationship between artistic production and art criticism, one in which its role is both reflective and productive. For Ramadan, the notion of “taste” or al-Hassa al-Dhawqiyya is central to the objectives of Sawt el-Fannan as a means of cultivating a bourgeois artistic awareness and aesthetic sensibility (what French cultural sociologist Pierre Bourdieu would call “cultural competence”) as part of the larger project of constructing the modern subject in Egypt.

This program is part of “Museum as Hub: Antikhana,” a project organized by the Townhouse Gallery of Contemporary Art, Cairo, on view in the fifth-floor Museum as Hub spacethrough September 21, 2008.

http://www.newmuseum.org/events/219