On Art Basel Qatar

Over the past decade, the term has been misappropriated as the blueprint for a new cliché: a dumbed-down iteration of Gulf Futurism that mindlessly celebrates giant glittering shopping malls and mega-skyscrapers, archaeological tourism and exploited migrant construction crews, gold-plated roaring sports cars—and art museums built by starchitects. The choice between “traditional” Orientalism and its new, tech-obsessed iteration is not the only false choice between two hopelessly simplistic alternatives.

2. Art Basel Qatar, or a piece of the puzzle
I encounter Sophia Al-Maria’s work again inside the four-story exhibition building of Art Basel Qatar. At the stand of Dubai gallery The Third Line, her Manga-like creatures with fiery hair, rendered in ink and watercolor on handmade paper, race through the desert in a 1980s Toyota Hilux. The work references Al-Maria’s Bedouin family while at the same time signifying a retreat from the glitzy aesthetics of hypercapitalism into traditional media.

London’s White Cube gallery, diagonally opposite, is a far cry from such self-inquiry. Georg Baselitz is here represented by a gold hand hanging down on a dark canvas background. Next to it, a row of golden shimmering bronze reliefs based on the same motif are lined up on the wall. How broad can a hint be?

The eighty-seven participating galleries are each showing only one artist. This is in line with the concept of the fair as specified by its artistic director, Wael Shawky, who alongside Art Basel’s artistic officer and director of fairs, Vincenzo de Bellis, was responsible for selecting the respective artists from options provided by the galleries. The presentation has therefore been filtered twice—first by the galleries, second by Shawky and de Bellis. The upshot is the pairing of big Western names (Pablo Picasso, Philip Guston, Christo, Alex Katz) with artists with links to the Arab world and West Asia (Etel Adnan, Mona Hatoum, Simone Fattal, Ahmed Mater). This clear dichotomy points to an unspoken consensus. Nothing seems likely to seriously unsettle, let alone displeasure, the politicians or guardians of public morals.

Under different circumstances, such a selection principle may have caused discontent among participating galleries, not only because artworks too identifiable as queer, nude, or both would have been left at home (LGBTQ+ people remain criminalized in Qatar), but also because, with only one artistic position per stand, it remains unclear how this is supposed to work in terms of sales. Rearrangements and new hangings, encouraged at Art Basel Paris, were not allowed here. It is precisely due to such restrictions that some past art fairs, including Art Frankfurt and Berlin’s ABC, folded—the crucial difference being that they didn’t have the backing of a royal Gulf family.

For insurance there is Her Excellency Sheikha Al-Mayassa bint Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani, sister of the ruling emir and one of the world’s biggest art collectors.3 In her short speech at the press opening, Al-Mayassa cited her grandfather’s founding of Qatar’s first national museum in 1975. “The future is always ancestral,” she said, referring to major forthcoming projects including a new children’s museum and an art quadrennial, slated to open in November, to “celebrate the legacy of the Qatar FIFA 2022 World Cup, where sports and culture came together in an unprecedented way.”4

3. Bend it like Beckham
Art Basel Qatar is, at least in part, Al-Mayassa’s initiative, and her purchasing power exerts an enormous influence on the fair and its collectors. In a press statement issued after the fair closed, however, no specific sales were mentioned. Instead, there was talk of “meaningful engagement with new collectors and institutions globally.”5 Obvious efforts had been made to make the fair attractive to galleries: a stand cost between 15,000–25,000 dollars—a fraction of the fees in Basel, while flights and hotels were also provided for gallery owners and visiting artists.6

European and US institutions are involved in almost all the major art events happening across the region, from the recent takeover by Frieze of Abu Dhabi Art to the Frank Gehry-designed Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, slated to open later this year. One language, however, was particularly prevalent at Art Basel Qatar: Russian. Many of these visitors flew in from Dubai, where large numbers of wealthy Russians have relocated to escape sanctions; others arrived direct from Moscow. Among those spotted was the famous presenter Andrey Malakhov, from Russia’s Channel 1. On his Instagram account, he was seen bantering at the fair with Naomi Campbell.7

David Beckham, on the other hand, is on an official mission for Art Basel Qatar. The English soccer legend is, well, what kind of ambassador for Qatar? Sports, celebrity, and now art? His ten-year contract is expected to bring in around 159 million dollars for the man with 88.5 million Instagram followers.8 In real life, he comes across as modest, almost shy. Whether being guided through the stands for hours by a representative of the fair, surrounded by paparazzi, or attending an evening performance with Al-Mayassa in the courtyard of the Fire Station exhibition and studio center, he always seemed to maintain British restraint. Only his raised eyebrow, in an otherwise Botox-paralyzed face, betrayed a certain exertion vis-à-vis Haroon Mirza’s theatrical sound performance.

A surreal “normality” set in at the fair. Either the art was historical, cryptic, abstract, or it dealt with one traumatic, devastating subject: Gaza. Gaza-born Hazem Harb’s collages at Tabari Artspace (Dubai), which combine archaeology with flight and expulsion, set the rather discreet, restrained tone in which the subject appeared. Other wars and atrocities, including those in which Qatar is a proxy influence, went unmentioned: Sudan, Ukraine, Syria, Iran. It consequently stood out that Halil Altındere, at Pilot (Istanbul), offered a sardonic, bitter prayer against destruction with a knotted carpet depicting a variety of Turkish drones 

World Cup Opening Ceremony in Doha, November 21, 2022. U.S. Department of State. Photo by Ronny Przysucha. Public domain.

4. Following FIFA’s example
There couldn’t be a better time for the kind of nation-branding in which Qatar is engaged.  “Brand USA” is now embodied by an increasingly demented president surrounded by a troupe of amateurish proto-fascists and psycho tech billionaires. Russia’s deathonomics dictates that generous state subsidies make it more lucrative for an average family to send their son to his death on the Ukrainian front than to give him a good education.9 The European Union, increasingly dominated by right-wing populist forces, is caught between these two superpowers. Meanwhile, the Gulf states and China are now calling the shots, radiating dynamism and prosperity. Following the example of FIFA, Qatar has subsumed the Art Basel brand into its own.

Cultural events in autocratic states trigger increasingly ritualized divisions into two camps: those who denounce, for example, the exploitation of migrant construction workers; and those who, conversely,  denounce such critiques as examples of Eurocentric thinking while defending positive developments among an educated, young generation (63 percent of Saudi Arabia’s population is under 30, for example). While the former camp avoids the Gulf states and what they stand for, the latter reaps the potential benefits of participation. The distinction inherent in this pattern of polarization, however, no longer reflects the actual division of the world.

Qatar demonstrates this very clearly with its self-positioning as an intermediary. Illustrating the point, Friedrich Merz, Jared Kushner, and Steve Witkoff were in Doha over the course of the fair, while Hamas interim leader Khaled Meshaal and Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi appeared with public speeches at the Al Jazeera Forum. We have long since reached the point where polarization based on identity is being boxed in by a “multipolar” alliance of authoritarian to tyrannical gerontocracies and kleptocracies. As a consequence, the art world finally bids farewell to its dreams of global convergence and instead segregates into regions again.

5. The art of diplomacy
The art world is generally not a stronghold of razor-sharp geopolitical analysis. It’s just too much part of geopolitics itself. This makes it all the more important for art to finally stop vacillating between pseudo-radical symbolic politics and courtly ingratiation.

Not everyone is caught up in this vacillation, however. There are, of course, voices that are speaking out about at least some of the contradictions, if only outside the fairs. The Doha branch of Chicago’s Northwestern University, for example, houses the small but very active Media Majlis Museum. There, a dense, detailed exhibition, “What’s between, between?” opens with Cities of Salt—the 1987 English translation of Munif’s novel presented in a display case like an incunabulum. What follows is a veritable swoop through the hybrid world of Gulf Futurism. Artworks and media installations convey the contradictory experience of encountering fragments of the past spat into a high-speed present as if through a wormhole.

In the catalog, Al-Maria writes a kind of eulogy for her own neologism that makes clear that Gulf Futurism, to her today, is the “exhaust” left after “the propulsion,” when “the vision of any future at all, stops.” Al-Maria also references Cyclonopedia (2008) by Iranian philosopher Reza Negarestani: a wild sci-fi horror theory-novel considered a prime example of Gulf Futurism.

To coincide with the opening of the fair, Negarestani published “The Human Centipede II: Qatar & the Broker’s Cut,” a brilliantly scathing analysis of Qatar’s cultural strategy. He outlines how the function of the Art Basel franchise in Qatar is a “Potemkin village of Islamic governance” that can no longer be “captured by the usual critique of soft power and cultural diplomacy.”10 Qatar, in other words, is turning diplomatic brokerage, which may have begun as a stopgap in a troubled region, into a permanent concept. The country’s self-image is increasingly based on its role as a go-between for hostile parties—Trump and the Iranian regime, Hamas and Netanyahu’s government. Qatar emerges as a sort of Switzerland with turbo gas propulsion. 

Richard Serra, East-West/West-East, 2014. Weatherproof steel, four plates: two plates, each 16.7 x 4 x 0.13 m; two plates, each 14.7 x 4 x 0.13 m. Photo by Ignacio Gallego. CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.

6. Cartographic cynicism
Acknowledging these diplomatic and brokerage skills should not lead to downplaying how Qatar has helped various parties rise to or remain in power. While supporting Hamas, Qatar also reportedly fed Netanyahu’s circle with substantial payments, as revealed in March 2025 by the Qatargate affair.11 These efforts are aimed at maintaining, first and foremost, Qatari stability.

For Negarestani, the art world is ideally suited to emerge from the resulting “geopolitical disorder” as a “cartographic apparatus.” Qatar’s “policy of strategic ambiguity” crystallizes, in art, into what he calls “cartographic cynicism,” a situation in which “cultural form no longer primarily mediates between artist and spectator, but between geopolitical position and financial power.” He leaves no doubt that the situation has moved well beyond mere artwashing. Art no longer serves merely as a fig leaf. It functions as a medium for bringing together (oligarchic) elites worldwide, and under the conditions of multipolar spheres of power.

The Land Art that emerged in the deserts of Arizona and California in the 1960s may have been an escape from the wars of the time. Besides, pretty much everything looks great in the desert. Now there is a rerun in the Gulf. Due to open in 2028, Wadi AlFann, or “Valley of the Arts,” will feature permanently installed work by Agnes Denes, Michael Heizer, and James Turrell. Back in 2014, meanwhile, Richard Serra planted East-West/West-East in the sand an hour’s drive outside Doha. Four steel plates, each more than fourteen meters high, were erected in a row, an extraterrestrial-seeming phenomenon reminiscent of the black monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). They blend into an erosion valley which, 130 million years ago, was a seabed: a magnificent and disturbing sight. It is as if the present is being sucked into this black void in the middle of the landscape. Sophia Al Maria’s eulogy to Gulf Futurism here becomes a set of massive tombstones.

There is no doubt that individuals involved in institutional and cultural initiatives in the Gulf may have the best of intentions, and produce good work. Yet that does not free them—or anyone—from the entanglements which, in the sense described by Negarestani, are creating a new world disorder. Old-fashioned artwashing seems almost quaint in comparison to the cartographic cynicism of the present day.



This essay adapts and develops a text first published, in German, in Republik.