In the current sociopolitical climate, it is difficult to address aesthetic production emerging from the Arab world without incurring an often polarized response of benediction or ire. Formerly neglected and emerging voices from the region are now circulating in the international art market thanks to both a surge of private galleries, art fairs, biennials, and museums opening in the Middle East and a swell of interest in the West, as evidenced by exhibitions (albeit problematically titled ones) such as “Unveiled: New Art from the Middle East” at Saatchi Gallery in 2009; “Light from the Middle

The main motif in Steve Locke’s exhibition “There Is No One Left to Blame,” curated by Helen Molesworth, was the male head, sticking out its tongue in a gesture that’s half insouciant celebration and half angry fuck-you. Themes of masculinity and homosexuality, both important issues in the artist’s work, were certainly manifest in this exhibition, but color—in both its painterly and racial significance—was Locke’s main subject this time. The slipperiness of pigment, both on the surface of canvases and on bodies in the age of Obama, predominated. With portraits made for our purportedly