The Formation of the Artist within a Contested Terrain: The Politics of Artistic Production in Mubarak's Egypt

State cultural policy is Winegar's entry point to discussing the generational variations that exist between different discourses of authenticity in chapter 3. Winegar provides a brief but useful history of the development of art institutions in Egypt since the 1952 revolution, while constantly emphasizing the ways in which changes in the political economy of the country shaped cultural policy and the mandate of art institutions. In this chapter Winegar is primarily interested in complicating our approach to the relationship between state and society in order to understand better how the state continues to occupy a central role as the custodian of artistic production in the lives of practitioners today. Here she questions the assumptions that autonomy has a single unitary meaning and that all artists aspire to the same kind of autonomy. Winegar suggests that artists in Egypt willingly depend on and engage with state institutions in a number of ways and to varying degrees (as is the case in much of the world, although perhaps to a lesser extent in the United States).

Differences in generational approaches are further explored in chapter (4), with a focus on the ways in which artists conceive of their relationships to their audiences and their obligations to them. Winegar largely constructs her argument around a 1999 incident to illustrate different positionings: the erection of a public art piece, an obelisk, in downtown Cairo becomes the issue through which these various subjectivities are articulated. What becomes apparent in discussions of public taste vis-a-vis artistic production is that artists across generations attempt to establish their autonomy through recognition of their expertise both as producers and critics. Their relationship to their public is one of the ways in which they do this; by positioning themselves above what they conceive to be middlebrow public taste, they hope to gain legitimacy and further their careers.

Similarly, the collectors who become the focus of chapter 5 are attempting to establish their relationship to the nation and to other Egyptians; art collecting is simultaneously a nearing and distancing strategy for them. Much like the artists discussed in the previous chapter, the collectors Winegar focuses on repeatedly assert their superiority vis-a-vis public taste and their ability to see and appreciate things that are generally overlooked by others. However it is through their acquisitions that this elite can explore its "newfound sense of being Egyptian" in a post-Infitah era (248).

Chapter 6 is "concerned with what happened in Egypt's state-centric, nation-oriented field of artistic production when the intensified global circulation of art and money pushed for the privatization of the culture industries and the disaggregation of the nation," namely through the notable increase since the late 1990s in private, often foreign-run galleries in downtown Cairo (277). It is here that the consequences of Mubarak's neoliberal policies--and thus the importance of this study's historical moment--for artistic production and consumption become most apparent. In the most forceful chapter in Creative Reckonings, Winegar probalematizes the discourses of power in the interaction between foreign gallery owners and curators and Egyptian artists by pointing to paternalistic aspects of the relationship, as well as ways in which agency is denied to local artists and art interlocutors. The overlap between state and private-sector discourses illustrates that at stake here is the right to represent; it is a vying over the right to be modern. Given her awareness of these complex and nuanced relationships, it would have been interesting to see Winegar take a bolder stance more often.