INVESTMENT Shaikha Mai bint Mohammed Al Khalifa, Culture Minister of Bahrain, explains the “rush into art” on the Arabian Gulf
Not since Catherine the Great enlarged the Hermitage Palace and built Tsarskoye Selo on the hills outside St Petersburg with Peterhof and Pavlovsk soon to follow, have lovers of art seen anything quite like it.
Some of the world’s finest museums will rise on the shores of the Arabian Gulf in the next ten years. They have few equals in magnificence since the museum building of the mid-18th century. Their mere numbers are not the full story: Abu Dhabi announces 12 museums, Bahrain seven, Dubai eight, Qatar 12, Sharjah 15. But the states define “museum” differently, and some in Sharjah and Dubai are small 19th-century houses or children’s art centres.
What will catch the eye of the world are the palaces planned on the Gulf. These rival, in fact will exceed as architecture the 18th and 19th-century museums of London, Paris, Dresden, Florence, Madrid, Vienna, Berlin, St Petersburg and Moscow, not to mention the 20th-century classical buildings in Washington and New York.
Hired to design and build them are the world’s most glamorous and most recognised architects: Frank Gehry, Jean Nouvel, Zaha Hadid, Tadao Ando and Norman Foster in Abu Dhabi, Hadid and Ando in Bahrain, I.M. Pei and Arata Isozoki in Qatar, Ben van Berkel and UN Studio in Dubai. Their creations are destined to become unmissable stops on a new 21st-century grand tour.
The visitors we are out to attract, says Shaikha Mai bint Mohammed Al Khalifa, Culture Minister of Bahrain, are “cultural tourists”.
They will come, declared Shaikh Khalifa Bin Zayed Al Nahyan, president of the United Arab Emirates and ruler of Abu Dhabi, to see “cultural assets for the whole world”.
It is a vast ambition. Before these museums can begin to rival the collections in the West, more enormous sums will have to be spent in filling them.
The shaikhs of Arabia have discovered the impossible costs of the 21st-century art market through the adventures of their most open handed buyers, the Emir and Shaikh Saud al-Thani of Qatar.
Auction battles between Arab Shaikhs and Russian oligarchs at Sotheby’s and Christie’s in London and New York have taken the price of single pictures by British artist Francis Bacon, as one example, from a high of $5 million in 2000 to highs of $52 million, then $72 million, then $86.6 million now.
Not for nothing, therefore, has Abu Dhabi made partnerships with the Louvre in Paris and the Guggenheims around the world for long and short-term loans of art; Bahrain is talking to the Royal Academy in London. In art as much as in oil, the Gulf and the West depend on each other.
I ask Shaikha Mai, herself an accomplished portrait painter as well as the Minister of Culture and Tourism for Bahrain, the cause of all causes for this Gulf-wide surge into art. “It is a natural step in the ongoing process of our state building,” she replies. “You must not forget that the states of the Gulf region are relatively young.” State building is not just that. It means state survival on the Gulf in a century desperate to move off oil. Shaikha Mai is open.
“Most countries are seeking to diversify their income beyond oil related activities,” she declares. “Tourism has large potential. Dubai offers us a rather successful example. We see cultural tourism as vital to strategy, with the infrastructure it calls for and the revenue it promises.”
Money is not the sole driver behind it, she emphasises. Art matters hugely. “These museums will advance cultural life and encourage critical thinking and dialogue in the region. Ours is an increasingly globalized world. I think it important for the Gulf countries, always very welcom- ing to other cultures, to promote, share and protect our own national heritages and our regional culture.
“This matters all the more as vast urban transformations are taking place.” Will the world come? Shaikha Mai is confident.“Cultural dialogue between nations has grown in recent years.Gulf countries participate ever more often in Art Biennales, World Expos and similar events.” (Bahrain won a Golden Lion at the Venice Architecture Biennale award in 2010). “Our ambition on the Gulf to play a leading role in world culture has converged with the mounting international art interest in our region.”
Is this a competition on the Gulf, to scoop the tourist billions? When UNESCO crowned Sharjah in 1998 the “cultural capital of the Gulf ”, the government of Shaikh Sultan Bin Mohammed Al Qassimi was not slow to act. “We feel we are the museum of the world,” announced Sharjah’s Tourism Director.
One senses Sharjah stimulated its neighbours. Shaikha Mai, speaking for all, insists there is no competition. “We are not rivals. We are complementing and helping each other,” she declares.
So while each of Abu Dhabi, Bahrain, Dubai, Qatar and Sharjah (Kuwait not joining, for now, the art rush) plan museums of contemporary art and all have museums of prehistoric artefacts, only Qatar and Sharjah will have Islamic art museums and only Dubai and Abu Dhabi maritime museums. Sharjah alone for now shows 19th-century orientalist painting, as it uniquely has a science museum and an aviation museum.
Abu Dhabi will have a National Museum of Modern History, dramatically concealed behind sky-high falcon feathers by Norman Foster.
Bahrain, alone, displays the ancient world in large scale and intends to showcase this. Its two forts date back to 3000BC while mile-long fields of sand-covered “burial mounds”, the Gulf ’s answer to the Egyptian tombs, span several centuries. Bahrain also has the world’s highest quality beds of natural pearls; its Pearl Museum on Al-Muharraq Island will dramatise 500 years of pearl fishing.
And not least it has the Gulf’s largest survival of 19th-century merchant houses on Muharraq, more than 18 restored so far in a partnership between the Culture Minister and the private sector. Quite probably, Shaikha Mai is right. This is not a competition. The longest air journey between these museums will be Bahrain to Sharjah – one hour; Dubai to Abu Dhabi, Qatar to Bahrain are 20 minutes. Many cultural tourists making the journey to the Gulf will aim to see all. 