I'm pretty sure they are -- and they certainly are a beautiful style. Orientalist paintings are unfashionable in the current Western art world, which likes Mode

I'm pretty sure they are -- and they certainly are a beautiful style. Orientalist paintings are unfashionable in the current Western art world, which likes Modernism and still, 100+ years after its invention, hasn't figured out that the camera didn't make painting obsolete; but they're extremely popular in the Middle East, which used to be beautiful and is now drab, and where the rich want some sort of record of what their world ought to look like. Art has fallen into the same sort of trap as architecture, where you get otherwise-intelligent, otherwise-tasteful students of the field -- like the author of McMansion Hell -- swooning over abominations like Boston's Government Center. Trust your heart, not academia. Refine your heart, to be sure (art is that which doesn't fall apart when you start asking questions about it); but trust it.