Noor Riyadh 2025

below, the drone show at STC metro station, a building which looks like it has been iced with cream cheese. I had my doubts about drone shows . . . I had my doubts about Noor . . . What impressed me most, strange to say, and allayed my doubts, was that none of the public art was watered down. The music, if there was music or sound, was loud, sometimes aggressive, high-pitched, as the video below shows, and sub-bass you'd expect to hear in a club, not on the street. I also suspected the quality, that, like the recent ComedyFest, Western prejudice would restrict the number of good artists willing to come, and risk their reputations by tacit endorsement in attending of the authoritarian state—

the designation is a convenience, it's stupid in other words, in exactly the sense I present here: it plays into a politics of safety culture, not in front of the women and children, lest we offend against sensitivities we assume on their behalf, full of political compromise. (As we know, the Right has taken over this space and called it woke.) (Another parenthesis, just to insert the observation, which has been made elsewhere, that the turn away from politics, from trust in political institutions that characterises the Left, bears this fruit, anti-politics, which, under terms like woke and other cultural categories of political compromise, is ripe for picking, by the Right.)

Art on the streets of Saudi Arabia doesn't compromise—in the particular respect of being watered down art. . . Critical thinking scratches its patch, over one eye, and raises the objection: But it compromises in political content. And this is the important thing!

. . . but is it? . . . there has been so much bad art because it has been tainted by good intentions, and good intentions meant to please as well as good political intentions: what is called kitsch. Art that doesn't want to give offense is the worst of it. (You can see the problem, giving offense, best of all political offense, is seen to be the purpose of art.) (see here too.) . . . there are additional things to be said about what it means, for KSA and for art, that it is increasingly active in the Art World, in other words the market-place for art.

Then, drone art, I didn't think I could be converted; I had visions of the drones falling from above and setting everything on fire, as happened in China; but it was exciting. It was, having the perfect coordination of the best Busby Berkeley (for a racy number in son et lumière), just about astonishing. What I expected from Noor actually was un spectacle « son et lumière », which, while you marveled at the technical aspects, were and are always like soufflés, more air than food. About Noor, along with other things, you can read here.