Aga Khan Museum
The day after Dashcon 21, I checked out the museum across the street from it, the Aga Khan Museum.
The Aga Khan is a hereditary title that's sort of like a combination pope and king for a sect of Shiite muslims, the Nizari Isma'ilis who number around 12-15 million globally.
Aga Khan IV, the one that built the museum, inherited the title in 1957 at the age of 202. He owned several yachts, hundreds of racehorses and a stud farm, private jets, a tropical island, and several luxury properties around the world. He married and divorced one supermodel, which is pretty normal for his family. He seems, genuinely, to be a pretty baller guy with a good head on his shoulders, much more than you would expect for a hereditary ruler of a religious sect. No scandals and no allegations, except sometimes other heads of state get in hot water from accepting too many invitations from him to hang out on his yacht. You can read more about him on wikipedia.
Anyways, he was a patron of the arts. His foundations provide ample amounts of funding for contemporary muslim artists, and in response, they turn out beautiful work, some of which I saw at the museum. The museum that he built and is named after him, in some random Toronto suburb.
There was a lot of gallery space dedicated to older stuff, of course. Things like this 1500 year old door (I guess wood doesn't rot in dry desert climes?):
(btw, if you open the images in a new tab, you can zoom in)
And gorgeous tilework from the 16th century:
But it's the contemporary stuff that really caught my attention. There were so many pieces of ornamental calligraphy (illumination), all so stunning and intricate that I became bizarrely angry at the state of printer technology, because I don't think we can actually print and mass produce art with this level of detail, and suddenly I realized what a horrible loss that is 3.
This is a piece done by a contemporary Turkish artist named Arda Çakmak. It's the size of a small poster, or maybe an extra large coffee table book, pleasingly symmetrical and elaborate in its composition, with many pleasing shades of blue:
Here it is zoomed in a bit, and you can appreciate this sort of recurring spade-like shape, and the way the eightfold symmetry expands out to sixteen and thirty-twofold:
And you zoom in a bit more, and you start to notice the individual flowers and vines, and also that the shade of dark red used is quite pretty:
And a bit more, and you notice the shading work done on each individual millimetre-wide petal and the way the gold leaf is somehow stamped consistently in a sharp, geometric tessellated pattern the size of pinheads (actually much smaller, the holes your pins would make would be hopelessly oafish in comparison) and you kind of feel like your face is melting a bit even though you are stone cold sober:
(Also I apologize for my crappy photography.)
It's overwhelming! You spend five entire minutes trying to drink in all the detail of a single piece. The edges, where the flowers are arranged in some sort of underlying geometric logic you cant quite make out:
The corners, where you try to count the number of distinct borders and very quickly give up, but at least you can appreciate the tasteful transition into mono-colour and the use of negative space:
And then you see like, thirty more pieces like this on the wall. Insanity. This is an alive art form, there's an annual competition with grand prizes.
Other art forms I saw included incredibly abstract, geometric calligraphy (these two pieces are of the same verse):
And pieces of what would be bog-standard cool modern art, except distinctly muslim in character:
It made me really appreciate the aliveness of the islamic tradition, in a way that I think I hadn't, you know?
And it also made me kind of wonder where the good modern Christian art is. Immediately, a scripted answer springs to mind: the Christians are spiritually and artistically bankrupt, they only care about megachurches and drive-in sermons, this is not a game they play.
But as it is with a lot of cultural shibboleths, it doesn't really stand up to the least bit of scrutiny. Is it truly the case that there is not a single Christian artist collective who does modern art? I don't mean things like piss christ, I mean art objects created by people who truly believe in some version of the Christian god, specifically about their faith. Is it truly the case that this doesn't exist, or is it just that I don't know here to look for it?
Which was amazing btw. It felt like stepping into an instance of 2014 tumblr made real, but a better one, a healed one. One where transness and neurodivergence was actively owned and celebrated, cringe was well and truly dead, and the only thing that mattered was the love and community that brought us all together. The CEV'd 2014 Tumblr, all dressed up in their Saturday best, hot topic superwholock merch and galaxy print and way-too-intricate cosplay based on ancient memes. 10/10 would work for my ticket again↩
His grandfather, Aga Khan III, bypassed both his father and uncle to name him successor in 1957. His will explained that he wanted someone "brought up and developed during recent years and in the midst of the new age" to lead the community through the atomic era. As far as I can tell, he Aga Khaned really well and the sect seems to be flourishing and relatively well adapted to modern life, so his grandpa was onto something. Aga Khan IV died in February 2025 and was succeeded by his son.↩
In the gift shop afterwards, I looked at their collection of paperblanks notebooks with intricately designed covers, and they seemed so woefully lacking in detail. Like, the smallest design details are a gigantic entire millimetre across?? Are we still in the stone age????↩