In the course of the Smithsonian’s Freer and Sackler Galleries’ new project, “Feast Your Eyes: A Taste for Luxury in Ancient Iran”, observing that Iranian youth have long used art and literature as a window into the Western world, Azar Nafisi, a Consulting Editor for Interlitq, laments that Americans too rarely return the favor
In the course of the Smithsonian’s Freer and Sackler Galleries’ new project, Feast Your Eyes: A Taste for Luxury in Ancient Iran, a new exhibition of pre-Islamic Iranian artifacts, Azar Nafisi, the Iranian academic, writer, and implacable fighter for women’s rights, and who is also a Consulting Editor for Interlitq, has appeared (The Atlantic, 10.04.12) in a video recording (alongside Mahnaz Afkhami, Iran’s former minister of women’s affairs and president of the Women’s Learning Partnership and Massumeh Farhad, chief curator and curator of Islamic Art Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery) and observing that Iranian youth have long used American art and literature as a window into the Western world, laments that Americans too rarely return the favor:
“Over here the way people connect to Iran is not through the aspect of Iran that is enduring. Iranian people paid a great deal of respect to the rest of the world and to America, especially, by connecting to America, not through its presidents or its politics, but through its “golden ambassadors” — the Marx Brothers, Saul Bellow, Emily Dickinson, and Edward Hopper. The least any people can ask of the other is to respect them through trying to understand them.”
