HOWZAT

Abu Dhabi’s decision to create partnerships with the most recognised western gallery brands — the Guggenheim and the Louvre — is designed to break down suspicion. “If we’d started our own museums from scratch, it would have taken a long time and we would have made mistakes,” says Mubarak Hamad al-Muhairi, the head of Abu Dhabi’s tourism authority, whose office looks out over the cat’s cradle of new roads and bridges that link Saadiyat to the mainland. “By bringing in partners, we can be quick; we can buy knowledge, expertise.”

Luring established western brands with oil money — Abu Dhabi has paid the Louvre almost £300m for the right to the French museum’s name — has prompted a chorus of criticism in the West. Some accuse the sheikhs of “bribing” western museums to give their seal of approval to what is merely the artistic version of the leisure theme parks that are being built all over the Gulf. Catherine Goguel, emeritus director of research at the Louvre’s prints and drawing department, recently dismissed the Louvre/Abu Dhabi deal as merely a matter of “petrodollars”.

Others argue that there is something rotten about a cultural complex that will bring the fruits of the Renaissance, the Enlightenment and the intellectual adventures of modernity into a land where materialism and exploitation are rampant, freedom of expression is limited and democracy nonexistent. Design critics complain of “architectural megalomania”. Gehry himself — despite taking the dirham — has, in these pages, condemned the decision to build so many signature buildings so close to each other on Saadiyat island as “a group grope . . . a cabinet of horrors”.

Al-Muhairi insists that the Abu Dhabi developments are partnerships of equals. The architects get to build the kind of structures that would be hard to execute anywhere other than a country that has vast open space, few planning restrictions and budgets of “whatever”. When it comes to the collections, the Louvre and the Guggenheim will display as much Islamic art as western art.

“This is not a cut-and-paste,” al-Muhairi says. “We are creating the Louvre Arabia, the Guggenheim Arabia — not the Louvre or the Guggenheim in Arabia. There will be works from the collections of both museums, of course, but there will be curators and works of art from here, from Tehran, from Egypt, from Syria, from Morocco. We are bringing the West to the Middle East, but also showcasing the Middle East to the West.”

That, it turns out, is the point of these cultural grands projets. The sheikhs want to use the new museums and galleries to change western perceptions of Islam and Islam’s perceptions of the West. In her sunbaked office in Qatar, Sheikha al-Mayassa, the daughter of the Emir of Qatar and chair of the Qatar Museum Authority, acknowledges that, thanks to recent history “people see Islam as a violent religion. We want to go back in time and showcase, with evidence, the fact that Islam is a peaceful religion at the heart of the most intellectually and culturally sophisticated societies in history. That’s our message”.

It’s one that comes through loud and clear in the museum’s exhibits, most notably the collection of complex scientific instruments, such as the 10th-century astrolabes that ancient Islamic scholars used to map the stars and determine prayer times.

The sheikhs also hope that, by hosting exhibitions of western art, the new museums will drag the more conservative elements of local society by the scruff of their dishdashas into the modern artistic world. Both al-Mayassa and al-Muhairi insist that there will be no restrictions on works displayed. Nudes will be featured in paintings and sculpture — a remarkable attempt to push the boundaries of public taste in a region where some newspapers still airbrush women out of photographs, fully clothed or not. “We don’t have a problem with anything, really,” the US-educated al-Mayassa says.

Modern buildings may be able to grow in the desert, but can modern art? Will a new breed of artists emerge, working in a distinct East-meets-West style? The idea that the Gulf could be the next big thing in culture might sound fanciful, but it is the richest nations that tend to call the tune in the art world, setting global tastes, anointing the next stars and establishing market trends. The Gulf states have all the money in the world and, as the modernist building blocks of this unique cultural experiment begin to rise from the dusty desert scrub, the new pharaohs are daring to dream big. “Could the Damien Hirst of 2020 be an Emirati?” al-Muhairi asks. “Well, why not?”

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