In a NYT review of a new Mughal art exhibit at the Met in Manhattan, Holland Cotter pens these lines:
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Musharraf as Cupid? |
India is the real subject here; you can hear it and taste it in this painting, as spicy as a vindaloo…That’s what confident cooks and ambitious artists do to the recipes they inherit… A vegetable curry or a peach cobbler can take many inventive forms and still be intensely curryish or delectably peachy…
… there is a picture… of an episode from the fifth and last section of “Khamsa.” And it is pure, melting-on-the-tongue confection. [Link]
I dunno, does a vindaloo make you gag? What clichéd hell is this? Cotter writes with all the insight of Apache Indian. This reads like a kindergarten newsletter hot off the dot matrix printer, clip art carelessly pasted into a Print Shop template. Using a spice metaphor for Indian culture is like complimenting Rosario Dawson on her breasts. Y’know, work a little harder.
As for the art, Mughal miniatures are absolutely gorgeous, but the exhibit in Connecticut sounds far more innovative, an art version of the game of telephone:
One artist would create an image on a sheet of paper, then mail the sheet to someone else, who would add to it before sending it on to the next artist. Part improvisation, part calculation, each finished painting both is and is not the sum of its parts…
The NYT: ‘As spicy as a vindaloo…’
I dunno, does a vindaloo make you gag?They include Mughal dress patterns; New York subway maps; phallic missiles; amorous couples; Western politicians as clowns; Islamic clerics as satyrs; outtakes from colonial photographs; many images of nature (birds, flowers, trees); of home (scissors, hearts); and of violence (daggers, bullets, guns), interspersed with calligraphy, scribbles and surface-piercing pieces of blood-red thread…Karkhana is an Urdu word meaning workshop or laboratory. And the six members of the group - Aisha Khalid, Hasnat Mehmood, Muhammad Imran Qureshi, Nusra Latif Qureshi, Talha Rathore and Saira Wasim - studied together at the National College of Arts in Lahore, the only school anywhere that teaches traditional miniature painting. (Shahzia Sikander, who pioneered the kind of work the Karkhana artists are making, studied there, too…) [Link]
M-m-me so hungry,
