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Due to the financial crisis in November, the future of art in Dubai is currently uncertain, but artistic developments in two other states of the United Arab Emirates (Abu Dhabi and Sharjah) continue undiminished. An analysis of how art, the ultimate Western symbol of freethinking, is a crucial factor in the socio-economic reorientation of a Abu Dhabi. I’ve only got a few dirhams left at Dubai airport. As I dash towards my departure gate, I spend it on a copy of Britain’s favourite tabloid, The Sun – except this is a special, United Arab Emirates version. I turn to page three, expecting to see some buxom beauty bare her ample bosom. Phwoarh! There she is, smiling inanely at me. But someone’s crossed out the exciting bits with a fat, black, permanent marker. In fact, every rogue nipple in the paper has undergone the same treatment. I imagine a vast, Kafka-esque room where one man sits and crosses things out, day after day, exposing himself to seditious material so that others can be saved from it. This concatenation of availability and restriction says something about the state of freedom here. From ‘free zones’ that are used as economic incentives to attract foreign investment to slogans like ‘The Freedom to Create’ (as espoused by the Dubai Media City development), the authorities here in the UAE know their future growth and success depends on dispensing more ‘freedoms’ than ever before (whilst maintaining a critical grasp on where such freedoms must still be curtailed). But when it comes to consuming art and culture, what are the reasons behind granting these cultural freedoms?In order to address this question, I’d like to focus specifically on the three emirates of Abu Dhabi, Dubai and Sharjah, because in their socio-historic geography you can witness a number of telling symptoms that not only reveal truths about the aspirations of a young nation, but also a set of displaced phenomena pertinent to the world as a whole. Like the ‘PreCogs’ in Minority Report, who can channel images of the near future to those that police the present, there’s something about what I call the ‘story of the story’ in this terrain, that can be read as flash-like bulletins from the future to our present. Across these three Emirates, you find campaigning for art, design and culture in strikingly taxonomic ways, many of which are happening for the first time: commercial art fair plays against large-scale biennial plays against blockbuster branded super-museum.

With/Without

It’s often one of life’s reliable rules that the exception soon becomes the case. In 2008, I produced, along with Antonia Carver and Markus Miessen, a book called With/Without: Spatial Products, Practices & Politics in the Middle East that set about measuring the ways in which Dubai could be said to be either a pioneering new beacon of the Middle East or, as it sometimes refers to itself, a kind of oasis of exceptionality that disavows everything everyone not from the Middle East imagines the Middle East to be – that is, copious bearded fundamentalists, a killjoy attitude towards drunken sex on the beach and pesky war. Dubai is one of the most self-conscious ‘Cities from Zero’, where the image of ‘zero-ness’ has been strategically mobilized as a tabula rasa upon which a new Middle East can polemically and controversially arise. Our book defined three distinct yet intertwined species of space you could see at play within Dubai and also in Tehran, Cairo, Istanbul, Amman, and Baghdad. We’d become almost inured to the typical news from the region: the inexorable speed at which skyscrapers sprouted. Perhaps less known were the appalling stories of the exploited migrant workers, the ones that led Mike Davis to brand Dubai as ‘Evil Paradise’: a new capitol for a New-Liberal era. But what role did art, culture and design really play in the UAE? What significance did architecture truly have? This question wasn’t addressed, not even when it came down to analysing architecture that wasn’t in the shape of a palm tree, a falcon or a simulation of Las Vegas. The European Enlightenment gave to the West, among other things, an idea about culture that was allied with democratic representation and unprecedented access for all. Post-Enlightenment art, architecture, literature, and science became, rhetorically speaking, the basic rights of every citizen. National and state museums and libraries came to embody these principles in institutional form. When we begin to think about the UAE context – tribal, royal, autocratic rule, Islamic Shariah law – the idea of an ‘Enlightenment culture’ (which also implies the freedom to express dissent against the ruling power) seems somewhat out of place. Perhaps we needed to rediscover and revalue what constitutes art and culture in non-democracies, how it functions and to what possible political or ideological end. It is under this ethic – and economic – light that I have looked at the development of art and culture in the UAE. How is culture there utilised? And is the cynical attitude with which the West has attempted to brand the UAE’s cultural sprint as merely profit-driven, accurate?

G.A.D.

In January 2007, nine years after the Guggenheim Museum opened in Bilbao, Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed of Abu Dhabi revealed that the dream team of Frank Gehry and the Guggenheim will reunite again, in this, the most oil rich of the United Arab Emirates. Guggenheim Abu Dhabi (G.A.D.) will sit on a manmade spit jutting into the Gulf from the currently uninhabited Saadiyat Island, which lies adjacent to Abu Dhabi. At a cost of $27 billion, Saadiyat Island — the new ‘cultural district’ whose name translates as island of happiness — will be awash with cultural superlatives and superstars. Jean Nouvel is providing a new ethereal ‘Louvre’, Zaha Hadid is offering a gargantuan, crustacean-like performing arts centre, while over 20 younger architects will sprinkle cutting-edge pavilions along the shoreline. The Gehry/Guggenheim reunion has ‘second-coming blockbuster’ written all over it. Guggenheim’s mastermind, Thomas Krens said, ‘It’s 35 percent larger than Bilbao. It will change the model of the art museum.’ But, like all hyped-up reunions, the traps are ominous: does Gehry/Guggenheim simply play the same, sensational, memorable hit again, condemning them (and us) to a historical inevitability of mass-appeal avant-garde? Already, Steve Rose in the Guardian posed the question: ‘Is the Guggenheim today’s equivalent of Planet Hollywood?’, that is to say, a global ersatz museum, a friendly chain franchise. Or will the G.A.D. seek – as Gehry implies – contextual, Islamic inspiration: the soft undulations of sandy dunes meeting the sinuous, black folds of the now ubiquitous hijab? Abu Dhabi’s less oil-affluent neighbour, Dubai, has been stealing all the limelight recently. Abu Dhabi’s other neighbouring emirate, Sharjah, has the critically acclaimed Sharjah Art Biennial to cement its international, cultural ambitions. In a bid to not become faceless and forgotten, Abu Dhabi’s stab at spectacular cultural destiny couldn’t get more ‘A-list’ than Gehry and Guggenheim.Protest & Deny Abu Dhabi agreed to pay the Louvre $1.3 billion to build the new, quarter of a million square foot building on Saadiyat Island. That’s $520 million for the Louvre brand name and a further $747 million for borrowing hundreds of artworks and treasures from the Picasso Museum, Pompidou Center, and other French national collections. In response to then-President Jacques Chirac’s description of the mega-museum agreement as an important way of bridging what the ‘world considers a clash of civilizations’ between Islam and the West, French arts purists shouted ‘Our museums are not for sale!’ Some 4,650 museum directors, curators and art historians signed a petition in protest, accusing the Louvre of ‘selling its soul’. Surely the French Revolution didn’t take place so that France could cynically export its beloved Enlightenment values to a non-democratic trophy museum built on an artificial promontory? Something in this transaction was uniquely upsetting. Maybe secretly, it was the unconscious realisation that the great clearance sale to the East was well underway. In 2006, Dubai hosted the first Gulf Art Fair (now known as Art Dubai) in the luxury setting of its finest five-star resort. According to the British art critic Matt Collings, the high profile, much-hyped event was evidence that ‘Art is what people buy when they have everything else.’ Lured by that very prospect, top-notch commercial galleries from across the world congregated, ready to do big business. They imagined that having rich people around = automatically creating future rich collectors of modern art. By the end of the three days, European and American sales of cutting-edge conceptual and abstract art had fared terribly, while Indian, Arab and Persian artists topped the sales list. Damien Hirst’s cosmically successful London gallery, White Cube, failed to sell even one of his pieces at the Dubai fair. This mismatch of product and audience symbolises the fragile and difficult complexities of transposing one culture’s ‘genius’ to another culture’s setting. Where imperialism worked, marketing can yet fail.

Sharjah

The eighth Sharjah Biennial (SB8) opened in May 2007. Its expansive title, Still Life: Art, Ecology, and the Politics of Change, suggested that nothing less than the world’s salvation was at stake. Sharjah, less widely known than Dubai, is experiencing a ripple effect from the hype next door. Much of Sharjah was put together in the 1970s and 80s and, visually, can still feel caught in that era. Less oil-rich than Dubai and Abu Dhabi, Sharjah has never been able to afford the extroverted trappings of decadent luxury. Instead, it has built up a reputation of sober, steadfast intelligence. With over 20 museums, Sharjah is known locally as the ‘cultural emirate’. It is also consciously less cosmopolitan. Alcohol is categorically illegal. There aren’t any notable beaches to tan oneself on, and shopping hasn’t reached megamall dimensions – yet. The Biennial, established in 1993, has become an integral facet of this sober posture, and since the organization altered the structure of its curatorial team in 2003 (to mix local and international expertise) it has come to represent one of the more progressive art settings in the Gulf. If, five or ten years from now, Abu Dhabi’s dream of Saadiyat Island fully manifests with its ‘best ever’ Guggenheim and exclusive Eastern Louvre outlet, and Dubai’s dreams of cultivating a commercial art scene to join the international circuit come true, should the Sharjah Biennial change its course to compete in the deafening realm of art culture? Or should it remain serious and tactically quiet? When I put these questions to the Biennial’s artistic director Jack Persekian in 2007, he answered that education, the ability to produce new works, and a commitment to the realities of the region would remain priorities. This was continued through into the 2009 edition, where the Biennial saw itself as a facilitator for new works that had an obligation during the intervening period between biennials rather than only during the exhibition time itself.

Culture Village

And finally, behold ‘Culture Village’, a proposed development by Dubai Properties (whose future, like many large-scale projects in Dubai, remains unclear at time of writing). Here, we could see the understanding of culture in relation to the other prevalent forces of profit making and branding. Culture Village was an unapologetic combination of retro-traditional architecture and super-modern facilities: ‘art galleries, museums, theatres, public exhibition spaces, fashion activities, institutes specializing in different disciplines, gardens, and many other activities pertaining to the promotion of the Arts in society’, goes the blurb. Perhaps the best line, reminiscent of Joseph Beuys’s infamous dictum, reveals that ‘Culture Village is a unique project … in recognition of the artists among us…’. Culture Village is like gentrification, except it goes in reverse: first the affluent people settle in, and then the art will (they hope) follow.

Media City

If Culture Village would have operated like other ‘free-zones’ in Dubai, things might have gotten interesting. Where Internet City allows full access to the World Wide Web (unavailable elsewhere in Dubai) and Media City is immune from state censorship of the content that passes through (unlike in the rest of the UAE), would Culture Village have allowed secular iconoclasm, political hectoring and a restaging of Yves Klein’s famous, 1960s nude-women-splattering-themselves-in-blue-paint performance? It was always highly unlikely. But even Yves Klein took time to become cherished by the Western cultural establishment. Art has always had a potentially dissident function in society, which in part has to do with its special status. This status can be cause for draconian repressiveness from the authorities, or an agreed protection that grants art and culture a stealthy power to say and show what cannot be said and shown elsewhere. In this way, the space of modern and especially contemporary art and design shares a political dimension that so far has operated at large in the conceptual master planning of Dubai.

Internet City

The special niche has now become the norm, or a hyper-norm, even. This, in turn, has generated the identity of a place where everything can happen (Dubai) in an area known for things being prohibited (The Middle East). The desert and the sea, in their virginal and uninterrupted state, represent traditional Islamic Shariah law that can effectively be equivocated to a ‘natural’ system of governance for the emirate. Each free zone represents a lacuna of contestable liberation whose values are more closely aligned to the world outside the UAE than inside it. The fact that the ‘carving’ process happens on the ‘inside’ of the sovereign state – which unmistakably maintains Islamic self-identity – renders several relative realities at once, in parallel, without the overall system breaking down in a fit of incoherence. The new ‘norm’, juridically speaking, gains its consistency by allowing inconsistency as part of its logic.

Yes means Yes!

With one of the world’s largest remaining oil reserves, Abu Dhabi (unlike Dubai, whose oil is set to run out in a matter of years) has the ability to fund city-state initiatives without calling upon foreign investment. Lightning-speed execution is guaranteed, due to autocratic royal rule and the fact that the government is in effect the lead developer. A ‘YES’ means exactly that. It is the polar opposite to much of Europe’s participatory, liberal democracy where layers of consultation effectively slow any project down or grind it to a halt.

The Speed of Form and the Slowness of Content

On Saadiyat Island, the look of future celebrity museums and galleries seems pretty clear, but not what there will be to look at. In other words, their extraordinary shapes are confirmed, but the contents – and the future audiences – often can’t yet be clearly described. This isn’t necessarily surprising, as it highlights the lack of synchrony between form (hardware) and content (software). While the former has been proven to be deployable at extraordinary speeds when the conditions are favourable (huge available budgets and a lack of legislative resistance), I’m less convinced that successful and meaningful art can be magicked into being through the same sheer wilfulness. Surely, Abu Dhabi and its ilk have to avoid the grave misconception that an endless budget is a sure-shot equation for growing meaningful culture and its attendant discourses. Some of us may sneer at the bling, at the hubris, at the naiveté of thinking that one can zap culture into existence like a magician with a wand. Some of us see hope in the Biennial model, or the informal efforts toward self-organisation. But the future won’t follow a linear plot that accords to any moral conclusions we might be tempted to make today. I’m convinced of that.

Sun

Which brings me back to the censored, bare-breasted woman in the foreign newspaper. I keep her as a souvenir of the ambivalent, inconsistent, irruptive freedom prevailing in the region. There is something intriguing about the fact that authorities here could just ban The Sun and its immoral ilk entirely from Dubai. Instead, this stuff is tolerated, as long as the offending elements are thwarted by customized censorship and consumed in the dedicated free zones. Somehow, this line – between different ideas of freedom and the control of art, design and culture – sums up the strange situation that much of the UAE finds itself in today. Shumon Basar is a writer, editor, curator. He is director of Curatorial Practices and Cultural Projects at the Architectural Association in London. He has been editor of various publications on the UAE, including: Cities from Zero, AA, 2007 and With/Without, Moutamarat/Bidoun, 2007. Currently he is working on a novel that takes place in the Gulf, entitled World, World, World!.