The MET's Islamic Aesthetic is a Path to Cultural Understanding

WALL STREET JOURNAL
By Lee Lawrence

THE CARPET GALLERY, with its 16th-century decorative Spanish ceiling of interlocking stars and polygons

NEW YORK - After almost 8½ years, the Metropolitan Museum of Art has reopened its galleries of Islamic art in a display as appealing to the senses as it is exciting to the mind. Conceived post-9/11, this reinstallation comes across as a concerted effort to foster greater understanding of the Islamic world. The galleries are arranged by time and place, and as you make your way through them, the development of a distinct "Islamic" aesthetic unfolds as an organic, human process. Artists of the Islamic world, just like artists everywhere else, adapt and refine earlier forms, study foreign models, experiment with technique and form, occasionally develop something new and run with it. In both quantity and quality, the Met's Islamic holdings are the most encyclopedic in the U.S. and have few rivals world-wide. But what makes the new galleries so successful is that the museum uses its treasures to tell a powerful story.  [link]