Dina Ramadan at the New Museum
7pm Thursday 14 August 2008
New Museum - 235 Bowery, New York NY

Tonight at the New Museum, scholar Dina Ramadan presents A Taste for the Modern: Art Criticism and the Making of the Egyptian Bourgeoisie -- a talk on the current state of contemporary art production and criticism in Egypt, and how the relationship between is a component in larger systems of subject formation in Egyptian society. Ramadan takes as her point of departure the popular Egyptian journal Sawt el-Fannan (The Voice of the Artist), and that publication's role since the 1950s in aesthetic knowledge production and taste. From the press release:

Through an expansive understanding of its field, Sawt el-Fannan has produced a complicated and multifaceted relationship between artistic production and art criticism, one in which its role is both reflective and productive. For Ramadan, the notion of “taste” or al-Hassa al-Dhawqiyya is central to the objectives of Sawt el-Fannan as a means of cultivating a bourgeois artistic awareness and aesthetic sensibility (what French cultural sociologist Pierre Bourdieu would call “cultural competence”) as part of the larger project of constructing the modern subject in Egypt.