An Art of the Object

One of the results of the Metropolitan Museum's brilliant installation of its Islamic collections has been that art historians, critics, journalists and the general public have, willingly or not, been confronted with the need - or, at the very least, the opportunity - to understand the creativity of a culture previously relegated to a few pages in general manuals of art history, if not omitted altogether, as a distant relative of the grand tradition without sufficiently redeeming exotic qualities.