THE drudgery of the workaday life in Jeddah often has a tendency to bury the city's beauty beneath a malaise of crowds, noise and pollution. The role of the artist -- one of the roles, anyway -- is to renew that vision of beauty and allow us to see (...)
FIGURATIVE drawing and painting has a far stronger tradition in the Middle East than the abstract work that regularly fills galleries in the West. And nowhere is that more apparent than in the work of famous Bahraini artist, Abdullah Al-Muharraqi, (...)
THERE is quite possibly no artist more influential in the evolution of art in the past 100 years than Pablo Picasso.
Now, for the first time, 180 paintings, drawings and sculptures by Picasso, stretching from his early blue period to shortly before (...)
If acting and story were the reasons behind the worldwide success of Hong Kong kung fu movies, there wouldn't be many in existence beyond ‘Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.' And the current summer release, ‘The Forbidden Kingdom' would not have made (...)
It has been a long time since a film has been hyped as much as “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull,” the fourth installment of the now iconic series and the first in 19 years. Little wonder, really, since director Steven Spielberg's (...)
The intellectual underpinnings of art evolve with the material employed in its creation and artists are responsible for the evolution of both. While the exploration and exploitation of materials is one tendency of art, if form and content are not (...)
The Wachowski brothers, Andy and Larry, are responsible for the Matrix movies and V is for Vengeance so it's not entirely out of character for them to tackle the “live-action” remake of the old Japanese anime TV series, Speed Racer. Nor is it (...)
Egypt is the world's oldest tourist destination, its millenia of civilization having been explored by travelers from as far back as ancient Greece and Rome for no other reason than to marvel at the remains of what once was the center of the (...)
Approaching the Arabian Gulf on an otherwise nondescript Abu Dhabi avenue, the Emirates Palace Hotel appears as a gleaming city in the clouds. In the dusky waterfront haze, the massive structure seems to be floating above the corniche, its central (...)