The following “Conversation with David Berman” is excerpted from an interview with Margaret Ann Varner in March 2004.
After speaking in the Middle East at Tasmeen Doha 2004, in Qatar, February 23-26, at a design conference organized by the Virginia Commonwealth University at Qatar, David had this to say:
Exploring the potential of graphic design in an emerging Arab economy
“There is a great danger … that they will lose their cultural underpinnings, and there is great fear around this.”
“Margaret, I’ve been in Jordan and Lebanon, and I’ve just returned from speaking at a design conference in Qatar (rhymes with “gutter”… it’s next to Saudi Arabia). These are very different cultures, although they are all Arab countries. There is a difference in Lebanon, you have many Christian Arabs; in the rest of the Arab world you have mostly Muslim Arabs. In the Gulf you have incredibly wealthy communities, whereas in Jordan, people are far poorer.
“The conference in Qatar was a gathering of students and practitioners from over 15 countries. One of the professors at the University who organized the conference had seen me speak in the Czech Republic a year earlier and was very impressed with the message I was delivering to Eastern Europe. So he invited me to speak in Qatar.
“Throughout the Arab world, people are overwhelmed with Western messaging—in terms of advertising. Being dictated to as to what is the right way to live. They’re under a lot of pressure to become a consumer-oriented society—in a society that has not been like that in the past: where most of the focus of life is not around earning money and then spending it. The focus is around a very different spiritual framework. What drives your minute-by-minute existence, especially in the Muslim world, is a culture which defines how to live.
Camel with Pepsi
“I’m not a religious scholar, however I know that Christianity is more about what happens after you die, and the nature of the Universe. Muslim ways are much more a prescription for how to live each minute of your day. In the West, how we live our days is much more dictated by our free market system. We work to earn money and we take the money and we go buy things. And so, in the Middle East, these messages from the West about how to live and what to buy in order to be OK. Which is how large multinationals convince a lot of people to buy their products… mostly by suggesting that people are missing something from their lives and it must be fulfilled by consuming stuff.
“The 2004 design conference in Qatar was the first design conference ever in the Arabian Gulf. It was put on by the Virginia Commonwealth University at Qatar, a branch campus of their Richmond university. They are very involved in design: graphic design specifically, but all areas of design as well, such as architecture, industrial design, fashion design, and so on. There are a number of different design professions, all having to do with design issues. The visual arts school at the Virginia Commonwealth University at Qatar is probably the best in the region, and the Virginia Commonwealth University has been rated the best public visual arts school in America. That’s why the monarchy of Qatar asked them to come and set up a campus in Education City, in Doha, as part of their push to make Qatar the learning center of the Gulf… which again comes back to the respected position that education has in Muslim tradition.
“It’s amazing: there’s a series of campuses there with universities like Texas A & M University, and Cornell, etc. I think there are about four different American universities. One’s about health sciences, one’s about visual arts, another one’s about business, etc. They’re building a city of universities, and at the same speed they insist on building everything else there! Over the last five years they’ve built these university campuses, in a city, which has under one million people. It’s just remarkable. They are very wealthy, so they just decided to do it. And they just do it. You’ve never seen so much equipment having to do with building things in your life. It looks like, if you came back in a week, the skyline would change a little bit. Along with the 200,000 Qataris, there are about 600,000 non-Qataris who are helping to build the place. The Americans run the command for the Iraq war out of an air base there. It’s quite an interesting little spot.
Reviewed February 27, 2004