Art in the Middle East

Travel

The Gulf’s new oil paintings

The Middle East has turned petrodollars into art. By Justin Doherty

Many people think of the Arab Gulf states as something of a cultural wasteland, with glitzy Dubai at its centre, full of spivs, grifters, deposed despots and bored housewives.

In fact, for some years, a revival of the arts has been underway, as societies are shedding old-fashioned ways and embracing a new kind of modernity.

I’ve spent the past 20 years travelling around the ‘new’ Middle East and have observed the cultural shifts in real time.

I’ve listened to Arabic opera in the desert, watched taboo-shattering movies in Saudi, and met ultra-violent, basketweaving flower men on the Yemen border. This is a region full of drama and change, with a cultural scene on steroids.

Of course there have been noteworthy cultural artefacts produced across the Arabian Gulf for thousands of years.

Nabati poetry, recited by the Bedouin, has been a dominant literary tradition for centuries. Instruments such as the oud (lute), qanun (zither), and ney (flute) produce the authentic sound of the Middle East maqam music. Gulf Arabs have painted for ever – Saudi’s rock-art petroglyphs were carved into desert sandstone in Hail 10,000 years ago.

Fast forward to the 21st century and, with the Bedouin firmly settled in palaces and villas, cultural activity raced to keep pace. Today’s Nabati poets compete on TV in a reality show similar to The X Factor, namely Million’s Poet.

It all kicked off in the first few years of the new millennium. The generation of rulers who had seen their societies transformed by oil dollars gave way to a young, globally minded gang of modernisers.

Unlike their illiterate Bedouin parents, many of these young men and women had been schooled at the best universities in America and Europe. Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed al-Nahyan, the new President of the UAE, spent time at Gordonstoun and Sandhurst. The Saudi Ambassador to the UK was at Eton and Oxford.

The modernisers were the first generation to benefit from the vast oil riches their ancestors could not have dreamed of.

But they also realised the dangers posed by the tsunami of cash. Oil will run out one day and, before then, oil may cease to be relevant as we pivot to carbon-free energy. Unearned wealth breeds indolence.

And so, starting in around 2005, the Gulf monarchies started to shake themselves out of their torpor and got serious about the post-oil future: big, bold visions for society, management consultants, plans for opening up their countries and the economies.

Investment agencies were tasked with looking after the trillions of dollars and transforming economies into new sectors fit for the globalised economy.

Luckily for us, and especially for the 60 million mainly young Arabs living in the Gulf, arts and culture got a look-in.

In 2006, Abu Dhabi announced it had done a $1-billion deal with the French to build an outpost of the Louvre, to be followed by a new national museum and a new modern-art Guggenheim. Qatar followed shortly afterwards with its own Museum of Islamic Art and Museum of Modern Art. Football fans attending this year’s World Cup will be thrilled to visit the Qatar Olympic and Sports Museum.

In Dubai, there was an explosion of private galleries, selling contemporary painting, perfectly sized for big Dubai villas and perfectly priced for the discerning tax-free banker. Galleries that are now familiar names on the international art-fair circuit – the Green Gallery, The Third Line, Meem and XVA – exhibited in trendy warehouse arts districts, and showed their wares at new international arts fairs Art Dubai and Abu Dhabi Art.

Auction houses, long used to pocketing sheikhs’ money, recognised that they must do more than simply flog the second-rate Warhols and Giacomettis they couldn’t shift in New York. They began touring the Gulf in earnest, putting on auctions, lectures and swanky parties.

The Qatar Olympic and Sports Museum

The danger with all of this is that the new cultural outpouring misses the spot and – no different from London or New York – becomes a publicly funded benefit for trendy elites. The job of embedding the new wave of culture in the region fell to a private, well-funded philanthropic foundation, the Abu Dhabi Music and Arts Foundation (ADMAF).

Founded by Huda Alkhamis Kanoo 25 years ago, the foundation is on a mission to open up music and the arts to a new generation of Gulf Arab, getting music onto school curricula, running festivals, supporting artists and organising competitions. ADMAF runs the biggest student art prize in the region, and an annual festival that hosts many of the world’s top orchestras and performers.

The Saudis arrived slightly late to the party. With a population of 35 million, it dwarfs the city states of Qatar, Dubai and Abu Dhabi. This global behemoth is now ploughing its own cultural furrow. In 2018, the Saudis got rid of the religious police and, in an instant, rolled back 40 years of Wahabbist proscription of music, dancing and the arts.

Gone were men with long beards and sticks. In came raves in the desert, Lionel Richie and Saudi’s art fair Desert X.

Saudi opened its first cinemas in 2018. Saudi film-makers have talent and money. Wadjda (2012), written and directed by by Haifa Mansour, is the delightful story of a little girl keen to learn to ride a bike, battling against the patriarchal society she’s growing up in. Born a King (2019) tells the story of young Prince Faisal, sent by his father Ibn Saud – the founder of Saudi – to petition George V and Curzon to recognise his father’s fledgling country. You can see Saudi cinema at the Red Sea Film Festival in Jeddah in December. The rock star of Saudi contemporary art is Abdulnasser Gharem. A former army officer, Gharem has made a career from needling authority and

Salvator Mundi (1499-1510) poking at social assumptions. His thoughtful and provocative artworks include Message/Messenger which sold for almost $1 million, making him the highest-selling living Gulf artist. At Art Basel in 2019 he exhibited an immersive torture chamber, complete with surgical scalpels on a trolley – a not-so-subtle reference to the dismemberment of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi the previous year, by agents of the Saudi government, allegedly at the behest of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia. Many people refuse to give Gulf culture the time of day, convinced that every mention of Gulf countries must be qualified by condemnation of their human-rights record. This is a disservice to millions of Saudis, Emiratis, Kuwaitis and Qataris who, through no fault of their own, were prevented until recently from participating fully in a flourishing cultural life. The Saudis bought Salvator Mundi, the Leonardo da Vinci of Christ, in 2017 for $450 million. Questions still rage about its authenticity. Another Leonardo, La Belle Ferronnière, was lent to the Louvre Abu Dhabi by the French in 2017. No review of the arts across the Gulf is complete without a mention of Sharjah. This small, unspoilt Emirate is a sort of dormitory satellite to Dubai. The ruling Al Qasimi family has art-collecting in its blood and the place boasts many good museums, a well-respected biennale and the Barjeel Art Foundation, a collection of over a thousand works of modern Arab art. You don’t even have to fork out the The Louvre Abu £600 it costs to fly to the Gulf to enjoy Dhabi, France’s these cultural gems. They will come to largest cultural you. In May this year, the London project abroad, Symphony Orchestra performed the opened in 2017 Fifth Symphony of Emirati wunderkind composer Mohammed Fairouz. With the world turned upside down by conflict and in these challenging and uncertain times, it is brilliant to see such a massive flowering of arts and culture in a region so poorly understood.