Christiane Amanpour on Iranian Art
March 10th, 2008 by Menachem Wecker
At Marvin Kalb’s interview tonight with Christiane Amanpour (God’s Warriors), I managed to get a question in touching on religion and art.
In the program, Kalb asked Amanpour about a variety of things from the evolution of CNN’s newsroom to the struggles of being a foreign correspondent in a world where terrorists specifically target journalists to the ethical questions covering her native land, Iran, without bias. Amanpour said that American media is often “clichéd” in its coverage of Iran, but that her ability to speak Farci and to talk to “people on the ground” helped her transcend this.
During the Q&A period, I asked Amanpour how reliable she thought the information was coming out the artistic community, particularly the new film Persepolis, and bestsellers Reading Lolita in Tehran and The Kite Runner (see my review in Arab American News). Was art about Iran (or Kabul in KR) providing a different form for the same biased content, I wondered, or was it the same sort of transcendence and truth on the ground that she sought in her journalism?
Amanpour compared the pieces to Spiegelman’s MAUS, which she said she enjoyed, and said that she saw the works on Iran as reliable information. This is of course up for discussion, as I addressed in my interview with Fatemeh Keshavarz, chair of the department of Asian and Near Eastern languages and literatures at Washington University, in my piece “The new illiterate Orientalism” for Arab American News. But I did think it was interesting that Amanpour, who did not have good things to say about news in the blogosphere, saw potential for reliable information in religious art.
Image: CNN.