As an ethnomusicologist, I have watched for decades as humanistic scholars working in the Middle East treat arts that are manifestly the products of cultural elites as though they were representative of the society as a whole. From this standpoint, I heartily applaud Jessica Winegar's fine ethnography of artists and the international market for Egyptian fine art. Not only does she avoid the normal pitfalls that seem to persist when documenting the creative arts in the region, but she also offers us a finely nuanced view of Egypt's artistic community in its global context, bringing to bear issues of class, politics, education, and the structure of opportunities for artists in the country.
She writes of the plastic arts, that is, new creations in drawing, painting, sculpture, and related media. I believe hers is the first book to tackle this arena in the Middle East from an ethnographic perspective, and it is all the more commendable for that. Beyond the world of art, this book offers a much-needed and cogent exploration of modernity as constructed outside the West. While this has been the subject of some discourse in recent years, clearly framed and specific studies such as Winegar's have been few since many of us tend to tiptoe around the subject.
The book's purpose is “to explore how [artists, critics, curators, and collectors] created meaning and value in a period of social, economic and political transformation through what I call their ‘reckoning’ with genealogies of the modern” (p. 5). “If we think of Egyptian arts interlocutors,” she writes, “as navigating their way through the major social transformations of post-Cold War Egypt by creatively calculating their positions and dealing with the exigencies and problematics put forward by various genealogies of the modern, we arrive at a much more accurate and dynamic understanding of postcolonial cultural production than that usually found in Western art writing about it” (6). Referring to tradition in Egypt as dynamic rather than reactionary, repetitive, or fictive, she casts artistic reckoning as akin to legal ijtihad, the process of “interpretive reasoning by reference to, and as part of, a tradition” (7). Throughout the book she insists that the reader view art and artists as coming to terms with their pasts and presents in various ways, “reckoning” with genealogies of the modern. As Winegar spins her narrative of the Egyptian artistic community, these concepts prove extremely useful and constitute a considerable contribution to thinking about expressive culture anywhere.
Winegar clearly brings to her work a broad understanding of anthropological theory as well as a keen understanding of art. She moves easily through the artistic communities she studies and shows readers in some detail the lives of artists and roles of a wide variety of arts and artistic styles in Egypt in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. She probes the concepts and roles of tradition and nationalism in art and the local and international market for works inspired by these and by more external forces. She examines social uses of art in terms of collecting and collectors, and display both public and private.
The extraordinary strengths of this book lie in its thorough ethnography, its theorizing of artistic impulse and resulting artistic work in terms of class and the political economy of the time, and its fine treatment of modernity through the lens of art. Winegar offers a wonderful critique of Enlightenment thinking in an Egyptian context, taking on individualism and other Western-derived concepts of modernity as she goes.
The book is probably longer than it needs to be. For example Winegar spends too much time for my taste in explaining her concepts of reckoning and genealogy of the modern. Overall, though, this book will reward anyone interested in the history of modern art, the politics of artistic production, theorizing artistic expression, or “the modern.” I will continue to consult it for inspiration as much as for interesting and useful information and references. Undergraduate students of my acquaintance have read this book with interest and alacrity, as well.
