Giving "Islamic Art" Pride of Place Said to Explain the Louvre's #1 Museum Ranking
In the immortal words of the showman, give the people what they want, and they will come out for it:
The chart-topping Louvre had 9.7 million visitors, an increase of nearly a million over the previous year. Meanwhile, the second place Met recorded 6.1 million, about 100,000 more than a year earlier, after revamping its galleries dedicated to Islamic Art.
"What we're seeing is, I suppose, ultimately a kind of [audience reaction] to museums responding — in the best way that they can — to everyone's interest and concern about our relationship with Islamic countries," Javier Pes, the Art Newspaper's London-based deputy editor, told CBC News on Friday.
"They're all trying to show Islam's great contributions to civilization."
Though museums like the Louvre and the Met "always had wonderful collections" of Islamic art, there is great significance to presenting them "in their new, much grander setting," he noted.
Especially in France's iconic Louvre where "occupying a whole courtyard puts Islamic art on a completely different status than it ever did in the past," Pes acknowledged.
"I did ask them what they thought [their increased attendance] was due to and they did say that they thought the Islamic galleries had an impact."
In other words, Islamic art has now occupied and conquered the planet's foremost and most famous art gallery. Rather symbolic, no?
2 comments:
A reasonable estimate of the number of Moslems in Greater Paris (l'Île de France) is 1.7 million; additionally, Paris is a popular tourist destination for the better-off set in the Moslem world. I should think that _largely_ accounts for the increased traffic through the Louvre since its expansion of the Islamic art exhibit . . . but notice that I modified "accounts" with "largely;" I feel--but cannot prove--that subtle psychological factors are also at work. As the Eurabianization of the Old Continent proceeds apace, more and more non-Moslems feel themselves fascinated by and drawn to Islam and its manifestations.
As I have often commented on this blog, I think that Osama bin Laden's famous strong horse vs. weak horse metaphor accounts for a great deal of this fascination, as Islam in Europe feels more and more like the civilizational strong horse; but I also believe other, subtler factors are at work, e.g., the filling effect of Islam's uncompromising mores in a society that is now largely post-Christian, a socio-religious transformation that has left a great moral void in its wake. I think that the (quite near) future is going to reveal more and more examples like this, where Islamic culture occupies large areas that were until very recently the preserve of Western Civilization; the farther future may indeed show the full transformation of Europe into Eurabia. . . . But, as Mark Steyn likes to remind us, nothing is certain until it has already happened.
Very well put.
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