http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/27/arts/design/27museums.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&emc=eta1#
Recently, I encountered a New York Times article that summarized the new plans in Abu Dhabi and Doha to build branches of the Guggenheim, the Louvre, and a new museum for contemporary Arab art. Judging by this opening statement:
It is an audacious experiment: two small, oil-rich countries in the Middle East are using architecture and art to reshape their national identities virtually overnight, and in the process to redeem the tarnished image of Arabs abroad while showing the way toward a modern society within the boundaries of Islam.
My first assumption was the article was going to be wrought with Western ideas of Arab society of being backwards, not in modernity and not able to join modernity because of their religion. While this did prove to be true, the article did also problematize the project by questioning if Arab society was in fact knowingly presenting an occidental view of their culture.
The project itself is treading a thin line between creating a forum for the celebration Arab culture and creating another tropical local for the western art world to vacation to for just one more art spectacle each year— get ready for Art Basel Abu Dhabi! All jokes aside, many people in the Middle East view western spectacles in Arab society as a form of cultural imperialism and these types of developments have created many of the grievances Osama Bin Laden listed in his texts.
Here I am cautiously going to have to agree with those grievances and question why the Abu Dhabi is choosing to import ‘name-brand’ museums instead of creating their own locally developed art communities? To me it does seem a little excessive for these museums, such as the Guggenheim, to become mega-brands by having branches all over the world. (The article even sites NYU as one of the ‘brand name’ project occurring in Abu Dhabi). The article notes importantly that “both the Guggenheim and National Museum are being planned in the West” and “the projects themselves are being shaped almost exclusively by foreigners”. Even NYU has “no quotas ensuring that Emiratis or other Arabs are given a significant number of places.” The exclusion of the local cultural from the projects signals that the projects seem to be mere transplants of western society.
The sheik attempts to halo the project with the intention that it will help expand the horizon of the youth in the UAE and keep them from becoming extremists. But really, who is this project for? It is not for the youth and it is especially not for the poor youth who are most susceptible to extremism. They are building St. Regis, Park Hyatt hotels, and golf courses, not schools or affordable housing. There are even talks that after the museums are built, the next project is to bulldoze the desert encampments where the poor UAE lives. Maybe if the governments focused on providing social services instead or building a ‘Workers’ Village’ to house 40,000 foreigners, their citizens would not be driven to resent western society for being given the valuable resources the government should be providing for them.
The one part of the article I did find interesting was when he discussed the Orientalism exhibition to be housed at the Museum of Islamic Art in Doha, Qatar. While the many of the paintings he discusses are made by Western artists and are ‘Orientalist’, the Sheik likes to think of them as more artifacts, as ‘to many Arabs they are also vividly detailed historical records of a period that is otherwise undocumented”. Thus, the paintings have an empirical, historical value that should be celebrate, rather than shunned. He adds an interesting outlook describing the collection as ‘not simply relics of cultural imperialism… [but] as part of a cultural movement, an exchange of ideas”. He astutely recognizes that without these paintings a part of Arab history may have been lost and that they should be celebrated not hidden.
Overall, I’m less skeptical of the projects occurring in Qatar, while the Abu Dhabi project seems like another gimmick to continue hyper-simulation of the art spectacle abroad and to give the art world another weekend away from actual work.
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