[lbo-talk] Tehran, the Art Capital of the Middle East

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

Press TV interviews the French-educated woman owner of the Silk Road
Gallery in Tehran, a young woman artist whose work (depicting mothers
of soldiers who died in the war) is shown at the gallery, and an
enthusiastic woman art collector:
<mms://217.218.67.244/presstv/0704030/Final_Gallery_100%20kbps.wmv>.

The Silk Road Gallery featured in the program is online at
<http://silkroadphoto.com/>, where very fine works are on display.

IMHO, there is nothing like a little bourgeois aestheticism to add a
finishing touch to social revolution, for what better symbol for the
revolution's conquest of the wealth of the ancient regime -- including
its cultural wealth -- can be found than that?  But rare are
revolutionaries, religious or irreligious, who think so: today in
1966, Mao Zedong launched the Cultural Revolution.

Better to concentrate on struggle over political economy -- which was
actually at the heart of the Cultural Revolution,* obscured as it was
by all the cultural Sturm und Drang -- while letting everything go in
culture, but no social revolution has done so yet.

*
<http://kaladarshan.arts.ohio-state.edu/exhib/poster/pages/pages1/C14049M.html>
--
Yoshie