Kurt Andersen: I saw a little story in the paper the other day about a new hit movie that I hadn't seen and it sounded interesting. It has a farcical plot about a thief who dresses up in a clerical outfit to escape from prison and then bumbles around in the outside world in the charade as a priest, but what really caught my eye about this movie poking fun of uptight Islamic clerics and the Islamic religious is that it's a big hit in Iran where the Islamic hard liners are in charge. The Iranian mullahs not only prescribe the way people should dress and carry themselves in public but they also censor art and literature and music. I wondered if this movie is a hit over there right now, are there other parts of the culture that are beginning to loosen up?  So I asked Melik Kaylan who writes for the Wall Street Journal and who has just come back from reporting in Tehran . Melik, what did you see there?

Melik Kaylan: I went to see a much bruited British sculpture show, post war British sculpture which goes from Henry Moore to Damien Hirst and had caused a great positive response in Tehranians and gave the impression… I think it was a cause for them, almost like a political cause to go and attend and say “yes this is what we want more of, this is what we have lacked,” and almost to cheer it on like a soccer team or something because I think they felt… they deserve more than isolation, which is what the mullahs have been giving them.

KA: And for instance, what were the kinds of pieces there? What was the Damien Hirst piece in the show?

MK: Well, what had happened is that the curators, one British, one the director of the Iranian Contemporary Art Museum, had more or less filtered out anything that was really strikingly objectionable I think to the rather course eye of the sensor. But they'd sneaked through subversive things. And one of the things was a skeleton that had been pinned against a kind of glass triptych as you came in and that was by Damien Hirst and it was in particular subversive because it was right under the heads of the big profile painting of Hatami and the Ayatollah Khamenei as guardians of virtue in the Islamic Republic of Iran. That and other slightly other astonishing things made one wonder what was being allowed through and why and if someone was asleep on the watch or if there was some odd drift in policy.

KA: As you looked around at your fellow patrons in the museum did you find they were like the people you would see at a museum in London or New York ?

MK: Um, The Museum of Contemporary Art is a place where, for example, a lot of women go, where scenes of intimacy between boy and girls are visible which is small potatoes by western standards, but I saw them holding hands and having their arms against each other and so on… so it's obviously a kind of haven. Going to the Museum of Contemporary Art is just that kind of statement, it says “I have nothing to do with the Mullah's Islamic standards of culture, there's much more in the world.” And the people I spoke to as I was walking around the exhibition kept saying that kind of thing. They would say things like “This is happening in the world. Why isn't it happening here?”

KA: How exciting, that going to a museum and embracing a certain kind of art can have such high stakes in one's daily life.

MK: Well that's, of course, always been the case in totalitarian regimes isn't it? Because, what it allows one to do vicariously, as a westerner, is to go back to that moment in culture when culture mattered so much. When such enormous changes could be wrought, and one sees that in totalitarian cultures where something like an exhibition of instillation and statues and Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth and Damien Hirst is actually a sort of little nuclear device at the heart of the culture that's going to generate so much change. And you sit there holding your breath thinking, “well we've been through this I wonder if they know what it's going to do.”

KA: Well it's interesting. It makes one think of Azar Nafisi great book “Reading Lolita in Tehran ,” which was about the years just after the 1979 revolution. It seems as though the seeds of outward-looking progressivism that she was helping to plant at the time really have bloomed.

MK: Yes I think it's a real question why this has happened in Iran rather than in any other Muslim country of the fundamentalist stripe. The Iranian culture in particular has had such a rich heritage of literature and thought and painting before it became Islamicized. That's a kind of self repression that the mullahs were never able to effect, or if they did, only for a short time. These days Iranians for example, and for years as a tradition, go to the tombs and burial sites of their famous old poets… the Omar Khayyams and Firdausis of the world… and they picnic there every weekend. Now, a lot of those poets have said what by any standards might be considered obscene and erotic and subversive things, perhaps even blasphemous things. But there's an accretion of a culture that has thought very freely and the mullahs simply have not been able to do anything about that, and that's getting its balance back. The thing that you shouldn't expect and that's even not going to happen in Iran , is that as Iran thaws out it is not necessarily going to thaw out in a uniquely western way. In the same way that Iranians proved independent of their own mullahs, they'll prove equally independent of western dictates in the direction they're going to go culturally.

KA: Melik Kaylan thank you very much for joining us in Studio 360 today.

MK: Thank you for having me.