Met Museum Places Islamic Art on a New Pedestal

THE NEW YORK TIMES
By Randy Kennedy

Islamic Art Installation at the Met

NEW YORK - Over the last year and a half the museum [Metropolitan Museum of Art] allowed a reporter to watch the galleries come into being, as bare brick walls were slowly transformed into visions of ninth-century Baghdad, medieval Iran and early Islamic India, and as the museum found itself in a transformed position. It had long harbored ambitions to put its Islamic holdings in a bigger spotlight. But it had little idea when it began rethinking the galleries almost a decade ago that it would be doing so against such a culturally loaded backdrop: the American military presence in Afghanistan and Iraq, the escalating tensions with Iran and the outbreak of the Arab Spring. For an institution that seems to exist as a sanctuary from geopolitics, and often operates in isolation from them, the project became a delicate diplomatic as well as curatorial undertaking. [link]