megaupload files provides relevant search results.

Addia:

This is not addressed to me, but my take on this is that she is borrowing from established styles such as miniature painting, which have aesthetics of their own, and not establishing wholly new genre of her own.

That is a good point. Again, my remark was not addressed to Dharma Queen, but a general thought experiment, to point out what I feel is a necessary element of subjectivity in art. Feel free to weigh in.

I love Guernica. I love it for the reason I love the Shootings of May 3rd – the palpable sense of the horrors of wars. You feel the horror. I don’t feel anything when I see the Musharraf piece. It is cold.

That said, the two works Another Desi Dude linked to are lovely, whimsical and have an almost Georgia O’Keefish sensuality to them too.

in all my recent works of art, I clearly express my abhorrence of the military caste which has sunk Spain in an ocean of pain and death.

And it is the military caste which Saira Wasim expresses her abhorrence of too.

The Spanish struggle is the fight of reaction against the people, against freedom. My whole life as an artist has been nothing more than a continuous struggle against reaction and the death of art. How could anybody think for a moment that I could be in agreement with reaction and death? … In the panel on which I am working, which I shall call Guernica, and in all my recent works of art, I clearly express my abhorrence of the military caste which has sunk Spain in an ocean of pain and death.

So I don’t think that political art full of symbolism and condemnation need nessecarily be one dimensional or limiting. The more I think of Saira Wasim’s painting here, the more I wonder of this.

This is not addressed to me, but my take on this is that she is borrowing from established styles such as miniature painting, which have aesthetics of their own, and not establishing wholly new genre of her own. Her works do remind me of Mughal miniatures (which are lovely), but I didn’t see this piece of hers as very compelling. IMHO, she should remove her descriptive notes accompanying the pieces from her website as they tend to take away from her work.

I took a look at the rest of her work, and I do like it. There is certainly a sort of magic realism to her pieces. I liked a couple of her less representational works : this and this.

Well I like to think so. I really don’t know. But whether I personally am capable of that kind of discernment is, I think, irrelevant to the distinction I was trying to draw between a purely personal ‘liking’ for a work of art and the universal human recognition of its greatness (granted, it sometimes takes a very long time for this recognition to materialize).

For instance, I know people who regularly say they dislike Shakespeare or Austen or Hardy. None of these people would dispute the greatness of these writers. There’s a difference between liking a work of art, and perceiving its power.

I think while liking a work of art may be subjective, its greatness or value are not subjective. For example, I don’t much like the Impressionists. But I wouldn’t dispute their value in the history of art – I sense that the impressionists were doing something important, different, and doing it very well, in a way that has universality.

Suppose you came across an Impressionist painting before it was recognized as an important art movement; say you came across a Monet painting scouring the streets of Paris in the 1860s, would you still have known that he was doing something important and doing it well?