Jim Geraghty of NRO says he could have made it out of Legos for $150. I’ll be slightly kinder and say it does play off chiaroscuro – the principles of light and dark – a bit.

Here’s the description of the piece:

Raja Alem is a writer, Shadia Alem is a visual artist. For the exhibition, titled The Black Arch and curated by Mona Khazindar and Robin Start, the sisters worked closely together. The result is an installation that visually plays very much with darkness and light. It is about two visions of the world and about two cities, Mecca and Venice.

As the press release states: “The work is a stage, set to project the artists’ collective memory of Black – the monumental absence of colour – and physical representation of Black, referring to their past. The narrative is fueled by the inspirational tales told by their aunts and grandmothers, and are anchored in Mecca, where the sisters grew up in the 1970s. The experience with the physical presence of Black is striking for the artists asRaja explains, “I grew up aware of the physical presence of Black all around, the black silhouettes of Saudi women, the black cloth of the Al ka’ba and the black stone which supposedly is said to have enhanced our knowledge.”As a counter point, the second part of the installation is a mirror image, reflecting the present. These are the aesthetic parameters of the work.”

So why are we buying art that represents the narrative of growing up in Mecca and the Kaaba (the black stone monument that Muslims circle when visiting Mecca)? This piece represented Saudi Arabia in their pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2011. Where is this going and why are we not supporting American artists?

But perhaps most importantly, as I said when the State Department spent 1 million on a pile of bricks, don’t ever claim you aren’t funded sufficiently when you spend your money like this. And Democrats, don’t you dare claim that there wasn’t enough money to provide security to our people in Benghazi because of “the evil Republican Congress” when you’d rather buy rocks.

HT: American Mom