Love Prefers Swarovski

If the willingness of the well-endowed blonde Texan, whose path I happened to cross while the former was on a collector's shopping trip in Dubai for the benefit of her Mayfair townhouse, to accede to the prices of pieces by artists like Farhad Moshiri in Mona Hauser's XVA Gallery can be taken as an indication, the market for 'Middle Eastern' art is, one might justifiably say, 'well-stimulated.' And now, after the Bonham's auction in Dubai in March, Moshiri is 'the first Middle Eastern contemporary artist whose work has sold for over $1 million.' 

Dubai—the city to whose sudden growth the surgent interest in 'Middle Eastern' (though largely Iranian) art owes its gratitude—is to Iranian talent what Portland is to Afghan poppy. And, yet, you know all of those old-fashioned criticisms—articulated yet again in Jed Perl's recent review of Koons at the Met and Murakami at Brooklyn—about artists whose only real attribute is self-promotion? You know, where one is too frightened to pull back the Ray Bans for fear of revealing backlit, Swarovski-encrusted dollar signs? Well, I can't get them out of my head when I'm looking at a Moshiri piece. And none of this is helped by the fact that Moshiri cites, but of course, Neo-Geo and Koons and Murakami as his forebears and that the artist has refused to go to the trouble of placing a figleaf before his fixation with 'the market' and, um, cash, and that—oh yes—his work actually does come encrusted with Swarovski crystals.

So what if Moshiri's art is gross? It's his party and he can 'play with the idea of marketing and commodification' (his words from this interview) if he wants to. The typical Moshiri piece consists (if we use the $1 million specimen depicted above) of little Farsi maxims and words plucked out of Hello Kitty's dictionary (technically, the word, 'ashq, is Arabic, not Farsi, and suggests a stronger variant of 'love'). And, yes, a typical Moshiri piece might come with 'stunning Swarovski crystals and glitter on canvas' (Bonham's words). Isn't that, but of course, the point? Why, the joke would not—could not—be on the artist himself, right? 'After all, the idea of making work that is about the packaging of art has been there since pop art,' Moshiri assures us. But should the audience not expression apprehension when the disjuncture between jokester and joke ends up looking pretty flimsy? And must we really go through this yet again, only this time in a more 'exotic' location? So long as we have artists like Haerizadeh, why bother?