1 gallery · 1 museum · 0 places
Shariati is one of the long north–south avenues of eastern Tehran, running from the central city up toward the north-eastern heights — a busy commercial artery that holds, near its Seyed Khandan end, one of the finest museums in the country. Its draw is that single institution: a compact treasury of Persian art often called a National Museum in miniature. The register is a working avenue with a jewel set into it. The museum is the reason to come.
No published places in this district yet.
How Hassan Sharif and the artists known as "the Five" built conceptual art in the UAE from nothing
Before the Louvre came to Abu Dhabi and Alserkal filled with galleries, a small group of artists made conceptual art in the UAE with almost no audience and a great deal of ridicule. This is the story of Hassan Sharif and the pioneers who built a scene from nothing — and why their work still anchors Emirati art today.
A field guide to collecting Arab and Middle Eastern art — who buys, what it costs, why prices lag cultural significance, and where collectors are looking now.
How the Arab world went from selling its art history to the West to building the fastest-growing market for Middle Eastern art on earth — who buys, why, what it costs, and where the smart money is looking now
On the art world's transparency problem, the extraordinary markets the world is only beginning to discover, and why we decided to build a map.
February 2026, Doha. Msheireb Downtown — the old business district that Qatar has been quietly transforming into something between a cultural quarter and an ur…
Agrabah was going to be Baghdad. A war made it fictional — and then Disney built it back out of real places, from a tomb in Agra to a valley in Jordan that usually plays Mars.
The Sultan's palace where Princess Jasmine feels trapped has the silhouette of the Taj Mahal — which is not a palace at all, but a tomb. That is how Agrabah works. Disney's fairy-tale city was going to be Baghdad, until the Gulf War made the name impossible; the studio invented a place that could not be found on a map, then quietly rebuilt it out of real ones — Isfahan and Agra, Marrakesh and Mandalay, a Jordanian desert that has played both Arabia and Mars.
How the pomegranate became one of the most confidently named motifs in Islamic ornament — and one of the least confidently identified — across a thousand years of tile, silk and stucco, with meanings we mostly attached later.
A slab of sixth-century plaster in the Met shows a fruit you recognise at a glance: a pomegranate, and surely it means paradise. Hold that certainty up to the light and it dissolves. Across a thousand years of tile, silk and stucco, the pomegranate is the shape we name most confidently and identify least — blurring into the artichoke and the palmette, its meanings attached by later viewers, its very name partly a nineteenth-century invention
The long material and colonial history behind the most recognizable blue body in popular culture.
Almost everyone remembers that Disney's genie is blue. Fewer ask why. The answer runs backward through five thousand years — Egyptian blue standing in for lapis, cobalt on a Mongol palace, the eye that guards against envy, the last color most languages learned to name, and a layout artist photographing Isfahan just before a war — to a color that was rarely, in this part of the world, quite what it claimed to be.
