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\n\tActress Zendaya has been on the receiving end of some, ahem, piercing criticism after wearing ancient Iranian earrings to a London event promoting the new Christopher Nolan epic The Odyssey<\/em>, in which she plays the Greek goddess Athena. The film hits US and UK theaters July 17 and has already been the subject of intense debate.<\/p>\n \n\tZendaya got the earrings, believed to date from the first millennium BCE, from London dealer Charlie Barron, and then had them remounted with diamonds and 18-karat yellow gold, reports the London-based New Arab<\/em>, which earlier reported on the criticisms. Barron\u2019s website touts a collection that \u201cspans centuries, from antique and estate pieces to contemporary works by leading designers.\u201d <\/p>\n \n\t\u201cI find Western celebrities \u2026 to be largely deaf to questions of ethics and history when it comes to the Global South,\u201d Zirrar Ali, a London-based writer and expert on Islamic history, art, and architecture, told the New Arab<\/em>. Wearing such items, he adds, \u201ccan in fact constitute a display of power and domination: one culture asserting ownership over the heritage of another.\u201d Co-author of Ghazi and the Garden: Poetry of Muhammad Iqbal<\/em>, Ali describes his work as seeking to \u201crevive and illuminate a vision of Islamic cultural and spiritual renewal.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tAli branded Zendaya\u2019s move as \u201cdistasteful\u201d and \u201cin line with Orientalist practices.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tIn a statement sent to ARTnews<\/em>, Barron noted that the earrings are attributed to the Ziwiye Hoard, discovered in northwest Iran in the late 1940s and dispersed to various museums and private collections. (Objects form the hoard reside in institutions including New York\u2019s Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Louvre in Paris, and the British Museum in London.) The earrings, says Barron, were authenticated by London art dealer David Aaron and sold to jeweler Glenn Spiro in 2016; Barron acquired them in 2025. \u201cThey have not been offered for sale and continue to be responsibly stewarded in accordance with their documented provenance and all applicable legal requirements,\u201d says Barron. Spiro\u2019s treatment of the earrings, he argues, \u201cpreserves the integrity of the ancient objects without alteration or damage, while allowing them to be appreciated in a manner consistent with their original function.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tHe adds, \u201cOur intention was not to commercialise these objects, but to facilitate wider public engagement with an extraordinary example of Persian craftsmanship.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tThe Odyssey <\/em>promo took place on July 5, the day before Iran\u2019s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps attacked three commercial vessels in the Persian Gulf, further threatening the fragile cease-fire between the US and Iran after the parties signed a Memorandum of Understanding on June 12. The terms of the memorandum have been hazily defined, and the agreement has quickly frayed. US President Donald Trump ordered the reinstatement of a naval blockade on July 13 after notifying Congress that fighting, which never really ended, had resumed. The war began with Israeli strikes on Iran in February and has resulted in damage to numerous heritage sites in addition to the deaths of thousands of Iranians.<\/p>\n \n\tWhile the Zendaya earrings are not known to be of problematic provenance, they do appear in the context of not only war but also of a long history of improper removal of antiquities from the Middle East. Just this month, for example, New York investigators returned dozens of looted antiquities to countries including Indonesia, Italy, and Iran\u2019s neighbor Iraq, which received antiquities collectively valued at nearly $300,000.<\/p>\n \n\tThe film itself has come in for plenty of criticism over its historical accuracy. Political conservatives are up in arms after Nolan cast transgender actor Elliot Page to play a male character and Lupita Nyong\u2019o to play Helen of Troy, since the latter is Black and Homer describes the mythical figure as \u201cwhite-armed.\u201d The conservatives don\u2019t seem to have a problem with Matt Damon, not exactly a Greek ethnic type, playing the lead as Odysseus, but Greek-British journalist Chris Cotonou does, writing in the Guardian <\/em>that Greeks have been \u201cleft out by Hollywood, again and with no explanation, from our foundational mythologies and epics.\u201d (He puts forth Greek-American actor Billy Zane, who is four Academy Award nominations behind Damon, with zero, as an alternative.) \u201cNot a single Greek,\u201d he observes of the cast.<\/p>\n UPDATE:<\/strong>7\/15, 10:40 a.m.<\/strong>: This article was updated with a statement from Charlie Barron.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n [analyse_source url=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/art-news\/news\/zendaya-orientalist-ancient-iranian-earrings-odyssey-1234792128\/”]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" [analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/zendaya-odyssey-gold-earrings.jpg?w=1024″] Actress Zendaya has been on the receiving end of some, ahem, piercing criticism after wearing ancient Iranian earrings to a London event promoting the new Christopher Nolan epic The Odyssey, in which she plays the Greek goddess Athena. The film hits US and UK theaters July 17 and has already been the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[61,226],"class_list":["post-2046167","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","tag-artnews-com","tag-crawlmanager"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2046167","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2046167"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2046167\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2046167"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2046167"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2046167"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}