On the explosion of Middle Eastern investment in Western art and an exhibition of Iranian art at the Asia Society
The Museum of Islamic Art. Courtesy James Panero and The New Criterion.
by James Panero, The New Criterion
A few years ago, I came as close as I’ll
ever get to the center of the art world. Over Dover sole at Sant
Ambroeus, a restaurant on the Upper East Side, I sat across from someone
who might have been mistaken for an out-of-place young grad student.
While she was at Duke, my lunch companion, class of 2005, had
double-majored in literature and political science. Now at Columbia, she
was pursuing a masters in public administration. Casually dressed, she
looked as though she were on a study break from Butler Library. Her
demeanor was reserved, a little shy, and serious. “It’s work all the
time. Sometimes it’s just very difficult, but I think it’s doable,” she
explained. The “art world’s most powerful woman,” as The Economist has called her, had much on her mind.
Between taking classes at the time and raising her family, Al-Mayassa
bint Hamad bin Khalifa Al-Thani, known as Sheikha Mayassa (a name that
has a James Bond ring to it), runs the museum operations of Qatar, where
she is the fourteenth child of the former Emir and the sister of the
current one. “I’m still figuring out the best ways to do all this. I set
up video conferences. I have my staff come to New York every month.
Then I take classes,” she told me. Funded by the oil and gas riches of
her principality, a thumb-shaped pile of sand that sticks into the
Persian Gulf from the Arabian Peninsula, Mayassa has been leading an
acquisition program that, by a wide margin, has recently spent more
money on art than any other entity. “The small but energy-rich Gulf
state of Qatar is the world’s biggest buyer in the art market—by value,
at any rate—and is behind most of the major modern and contemporary art
deals over the past six years,” The Art Newspaper wrote in 2011. On ArtReview’s 2013 “Power 100” list, which ranks “the contemporary artworld’s most powerful figures,” Mayassa is ranked number one.
Qatar is estimated to have recently spent well in excess of $1 billion on Western art. These acquisitions reportedly include over $250 million for the last privately available version of Cézanne’s Card Players; $73 million for the “Rockefeller” Rothko, his White Center (Yellow, Pink and Lavender on Rose) from 1950; $63 million for Andy Warhol’s The Men in Her Life from 1962; $310 million for a trove of Rothkos sold by court order from the collection of J. Ezra Merkin, a conduit for Bernard Madoff; hundreds of millions for post-war art from the estate of the dealer Ileana Sonnabend; and other record-breaking prices for works by Roy Lichtenstein, Jeff Koons, and Damien Hirst (one piece alone cost $20 million). Mayassa is also reportedly behind the purchase of Three Studies of Lucian Freud by Francis Bacon, sold at auction in November for a record $142 million—a claim that Acquavella Galleries (the purchasing agent) has denied.
Qatar is estimated to have recently spent well in excess of $1 billion on Western art. These acquisitions reportedly include over $250 million for the last privately available version of Cézanne’s Card Players; $73 million for the “Rockefeller” Rothko, his White Center (Yellow, Pink and Lavender on Rose) from 1950; $63 million for Andy Warhol’s The Men in Her Life from 1962; $310 million for a trove of Rothkos sold by court order from the collection of J. Ezra Merkin, a conduit for Bernard Madoff; hundreds of millions for post-war art from the estate of the dealer Ileana Sonnabend; and other record-breaking prices for works by Roy Lichtenstein, Jeff Koons, and Damien Hirst (one piece alone cost $20 million). Mayassa is also reportedly behind the purchase of Three Studies of Lucian Freud by Francis Bacon, sold at auction in November for a record $142 million—a claim that Acquavella Galleries (the purchasing agent) has denied.
Beyond these acquisitions, which have been funded and stored in secret
by Qatar’s absolutist rulers, the Qatar Museums Authority (QMA) has rallied I. M. Pei from retirement to design a Museum of Islamic Art (MIA)
in the capital city of Doha, created a Qatari branch of New York’s
Tribeca Film Festival (where Mayassa secretly interned), commissioned
Jean Nouvel to redesign Qatar’s state museum, and sponsored
international exhibitions of the contemporary artists Takashi Murakami
(at Versailles) and Damien Hirst (at Tate Modern) while also importing
those shows to Doha. Now on view at Doha’s Al Riwaq Art Space through
January 22, 2014, “Relics: Damien Hirst” is billed as “one of a series
of major cultural events initiated by QMA
to endorse, promote and create opportunities to encourage participation
in and understanding of art within the community.” The exhibition
outreach includes an enviable social media campaign (see www.damienhirstqatar.qa) and a life-size mockup of Hirst’s shark sculpture driven around Doha by truck.
If anyone questioned the meaning of
these vast expenditures, they weren’t saying so when I visited Doha in
late 2008 for the opening of Pei’s museum, which displays the results of
Qatar’s vast Islamic art acquisitions. For the MIA’s
opening party in a tented caravan outside the museum on the Doha
Corniche, Yo-Yo Ma performed with his Silk Road Ensemble as waitresses
in bobbed wigs served fruit juices. The country invited the leaders of
the Metropolitan Museum of Art (Philippe de Montebello, Thomas Campbell,
and Emily Rafferty), top-selling contemporary artists (Damien Hirst and
Jeff Koons), and a member of The Rolling Stones (Ron Wood) to mingle
for hours as the former Emir and his family, including Mayassa, all
dressed in royal robes, looked down from a perch at the museum’s
entrance.
“We’re extremely supportive of what is going on here,” Campbell told
me during the visit. “I have some museum experience, so I thought I
could be of some help,” said Marie-Josée Kravis, the president of the
board of the Museum of Modern Art who joined the QMA
board two years earlier (Dominique de Villepin, the former prime
minister of France, is also a member). “We hope to create a new paradigm
for museums in the twenty-first century,” said Roger Mandle, the former
president of the Rhode Island School of Design and the then–executive
director of QMA (Edward
Dolman, the former chairman of Christie’s, has since joined on). “It’s
not bedouins and oil and terrorism. It’s about one of the great cultures
of the world in its time,” said Oliver Watson, a one-time curator at
the Victoria and Albert Museum who left his post as the Keeper of
Eastern Art at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford to become the first director
of the MIA. “This is so
inspirational!” Ron Wood declared to me inside the museum as he
inspected a bronze fountain head from tenth-century Spain. “Brilliant.
I’m so busy looking at the building I can’t focus on the art,” Damien
Hirst confided in a room of brass astrolabes, the astronomical computers
of medieval Islam. “This is where it all comes from, the past.”
“Here in the oil and gas world, culture is not emphasized as it should
be. I accepted [the commission] because of that challenge,” said I. M.
Pei. While costs remained a state secret, Qatar spared little expense
for the construction of what will be one of Pei’s final buildings, and
located the museum on a new peninsula of his own design. The same
limestone Pei used in his addition to the Louvre was quarried and
imported to Qatar from Burgundy. Black jet mist stone was brought in
from Virginia for the museum’s granite base. The state then carried out
much of the construction work at night, with ice poured into the mix to
cure the museum’s cement ceilings so they wouldn’t crack in the
130-degree desert heat.
For those operating at the highest levels of our creative class,
Qatar’s cultural initiatives have been serious business. The outlays
have been part of an even larger cultural program that also includes the
opening of international campuses by six American universities in the
Qatari desert—including Georgetown, Cornell, and Texas A&M—and the
launch of Al Jazeera, the twenty-four-hour news channel. The country is
also pursuing a sports program that may dwarf all of its other cultural
endeavors as it prepares to host the FIFA
World Cup. Qatar will be the first Arab state to host the soccer
tournament if allegations of impropriety in its selection don’t derail
the event.
Model of Guggenheim Abu Dhabi. Courtesy James Panero and The New Criterion.
Qatar’s cultural initiatives are not unlike similar programs taking
place in other Gulf states. Abu Dhabi, the largest emirate in the nearby
UAE, is developing an entire
region called Saadiyat Island into a cultural capital that will house a
branch of the Louvre designed by Jean Nouvel, a branch of New York
University designed by Rafael Viñoly, and a 450,0000-square-foot
Guggenheim Museum—its largest anywhere—designed by Frank Gehry. What was
merely a heavily bulldozed sandbar when I walked on it in 2008 is now
rapidly taking shape and is scheduled to open in 2017.
The cultural partners that Qatar and the other Emirates are importing
to their principalities largely claim to be there in the interest of
greater global understanding. There is a “conviction that interaction
with new ideas and people who are different is valuable and necessary,
and a commitment to educating students who are true citizens of the
world,” as New York University says of its presence in Abu Dhabi. Of
course, our Western elites would show little interest if these countries
were still merely made up of poor fishermen and pearl divers. They are
there to sell, but what precisely are these countries out to buy?
Anyone who follows the rise of the art
market can safely say that global demand has moved beyond the realm of
aesthetics on to other concerns. Blue-chip art has become a speculative
sport, a trophy hunt, a diversified hedge, and a means for money
laundering. Art now serves any number of functions that have little
connection with value and connoisseurship. Since Qatar has yet to detail
the extent of its own acquisition program, it is impossible to say with
certainty why the country has spent billions on art, but the most
likely answer is that the purchases play into a soft-power strategy
developed through such partnerships as the RAND-Qatar
Policy Institute and the Brookings Doha Center—which will become
apparent once Qatar opens a museum for these lavish acquisitions.
One of the many policy bulletins that Qatar has published in its
“National Vision 2030” plan speaks of enhancing international relations
through “an intensification of cultural exchange” in order to “improve
branding of the country’s global image.” Qatar’s “image as a cultural
hub,” says a 2011 report, will “better position the country to assume a
larger leadership role within global society.”
The United States itself has a long history of converting oil revenues
into art acquisition and museum construction. In the Cold War, the U.S.
also effectively deployed art and culture as extensions of its own soft
power. The Central Intelligence Agency fronted the Congress for
Cultural Freedom, while Alfred Barr, the Rockefeller brothers, and the
United States Information Agency promoted Abstract Expressionism as an
alternative to Soviet Realism. These symbols of modernity became
extensions of our freedoms of expression.
Advertisement for Damien Hirst's shark driving around Doha. Courtesy The New Criterion.
Such initiatives, which were considered scandalous when first
revealed, now come off as sound (and bloodless) Cold War policy. It
would be nice to see Qatar’s cultural deployment as a similar force for
liberalization, but the country’s track record on human rights
complicates this interpretation. Just last month, Amnesty International
issued a 166-page report condemning how migrant workers in Qatar are
“treated like cattle.” The country’s acceptance of “sponsorship”
employment, a practice used throughout the region, ties laborers to
their sponsor employers who have imported them into the country. This
form of indentured servitude often leaves workers, from countries like
Nepal, India, and Sri Lanka, exploitable and limited in their rights.
The report detailed dangerous working conditions, squalid living
standards, wages reduced or withheld for months, and workers forced to
offer bribes in return for their passports. A video report by The Guardian
shows workers who have been beaten by their employers and left
penniless in a legal limbo without any means of returning home. At the
current rate of worker mortality, one estimate says that 4,000 laborers
will die in Qatar as the country makes preparations to host the 2022
World Cup.
For a country with one of the world’s highest GDPs,
its treatment of guest workers is only one of many alarming concerns.
While Qatari women were granted the right to vote in 1999, and women can
hold positions throughout the government, only about 250,000 of
Qatar’s 2 million residents are citizens, and the rights of citizenship
are rarely extended beyond the country’s indigenous tribes. Stoning and
other forms of corporal punishments are still on the books. The
U.S.-based Freedom House continues to label Qatar as “not free.”
While Qatar can point to its creation of Al Jazeera, the
Middle-Eastern news service, as evidence of relatively progressive
attitudes towards the press, criticism of the state remains a high
crime. In 2011, Mohammed al-Ajami, a Qatari-born literature student, was
arrested for allegedly insulting the Emir and, a year later, sentenced
to life imprisonment, reduced to fifteen years after appeal. One of his
poems called “Tunisian Jasmine” questioned “Why, why do these regimes/
import everything from the West—/ everything but the rule of law, that
is,/ and everything but freedom?” After al-Ajami’s sentencing, a
representative for Qatar’s Human Rights Committee couldn’t explain why
Al Jazeera did not report the story, which had been widely covered by
the BBC and other news outlets. Yet he reminded reporters that anyone reading the poem in Qatar could be sentenced to life in prison.
Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian. Untitled, 1977. Mirror, reverse glass painting, and plaster on wood. 41 1/2 x 41 1/2 in. (105.4 x 105.4 cm). Collection of Zahra Farmanfarmaian. Courtesy The New Criterion.
Qatar’s cultural initiatives share less
with the Congress for Cultural Freedom and more with modernism under the
Shah. Iran’s former progressive cultural program was deployed in tandem
with the brutal SAVAK secret
police, which at first held back but eventually propelled the Iranian
Revolution. Like Mayassa, Empress Farah Pahlavi was an outspoken
supporter of modern art in Iran. A fascinating exhibition now on view at
Asia Society in New York reveals the ghostly richness of that country’s
once-thriving modernist community. The first Tehran Biennial of
contemporary art was inaugurated in 1958 and exhibited artists from
Saqqakhaneh and the country’s other indigenous movements. The Shiraz
Arts Festival, started in 1967 and sponsored by National Iranian Radio
and Television, brought together avant-garde theater and performance
from around the globe—and in 1977 was denounced by the Ayatollah
Khomeini from exile in Iraq.
In a fascinating interview with Asia Society published online in
October, the writer Bob Colacello describes his visit to Iran in 1976
with Andy Warhol, who was there to take polaroids of the Empress for a
portrait commission. Admitting that “all these artists wanted to sell
stuff to the Iranians—they wanted to make money,” Colacello saw a
country “dealing with this balance between the West and the East and
between traditional culture and modernization and globalization.” He
also describes the chilling memory of dining with Amir-Abbas Hoveyda,
the prime minister and brother of his host, who was executed by the
Ayatollah’s Revolutionary Court just two years later.
In late 1977, the Empress unveiled her crowning achievement in the
opening of the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art, featuring a permanent
collection that included Monet, Van Gogh, Pissarro, Renoir, Gauguin,
Toulouse-Lautrec, Magritte, Miró, Braque, and one of Pollock’s most
important paintings, Mural on a Red Indian Ground (1950).
Supporters of the museum had to form a human chain around the
institution two years later to save it from destruction by
revolutionaries, who were eventually convinced of the value of the
decadent Western art inside and moved it to storage, where it remains
today. The largely unseen collection is now estimated to be worth $2.5
billion.
On the one hand, Qatar’s art initiatives can be seen as a
modernizing force, one that could liberalize the tribal attitudes of the
country’s native population and pave the way for further political
reform. On the other hand, contemporary art may merely serve as a cover
for further repressive policies. This artifice of modernism mirrors
Qatar’s other contradictory diplomatic positions. An ally to the United
States and host of U.S. Central Command, Qatar nevertheless
reportedly helped Khalid Sheikh Mohammed escape U.S. capture in the
1990s, may have been paying protection money to al Qaeda, and is
currently arming radical Syrian rebels and offering safe haven to
Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood.
The terrible history of Iran demonstrates what can happen when a
modernist culture merely overlays a repressive regime. In such
circumstances, artists and organizations might profit by spreading
modernity, but they are also abetting a compromised state. The two go
hand in hand, liberalizing on the one and oppressing on the other. The
art, meanwhile, continues its own transformation, evolving from images
of Provençal peasant life and visions of abstract thought into symbols
of autocratic power. Should a state like Qatar ever collapse, the
results would leave a hole not only in the art market but in the culture
of art itself. In the meantime, épater la bourgeoisie has become state policy in the modernizing capital of Doha, while épater l’Emir remains a capital offense.
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