In the days before the arrival of the internet, Western art history education in Pakistan was mostly disseminated through black and white photocopies of original publications. The glossy pages of art books were transformed into rough copies in varying shades of gray. Rather than understanding this as a disadvantage, I propose, conversely, that this practice constituted a form of radical piracy—the blurred, partial and often completely indecipherable nature of this material proved to be, in fact, a kind of liberation.