BASEL, Switzerland — This year the world’s biggest art fair announced a new host city to its roster for high net worth collectors and prestigious galleries: Doha.
The move is the latest symbol of something that has a long history ― top-end art meshing with big money. That raises important questions about where culture stops and business and politics begin.
Qatar’s capital joins a short list of cities that put on fairs belonging to Art Basel, a franchise that has become a behemoth in contemporary art, and which includes Paris, Hong Kong, Miami, and Basel in Switzerland, from where it takes its name.
At first glance, the Gulf State isn’t an obvious choice for an art mega-fair. The contemporary art scene evolved out of the ateliers of Paris and New York, and for a long time the art market remained, with some important exceptions, a largely Euro-American affair.
That’s changed, and Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East have become increasingly important markets for collectors. Sheikha Al Mayassa bint Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani, the sister of the current emir, put Qatar on the art world map. She manages the country’s museum network which at one point was spending a reported $1 billion a year to amass a collection of works that includes a $250 million painting of card players by Cézanne, and a $300 million Gauguin.
It paid off — with the Gulf State set to host a new edition of the prestigious fair in February. It’s just the latest coup for Qatar, uncomfortably wedged between Saudi Arabia and, across the Persian Gulf, Iran, as it expands its soft power by hosting global events and securing the friendship of the rich and powerful through investment and entertainment.
Clinching the 2022 FIFA World Cup was its single biggest win. But Doha’s push to win friends and influence people has a dark side. The World Cup bid exposed the country to accusations of bribery and labor rights violations. Activists said that as many as 6,500 workers died building the stadiums in extreme conditions. The official numbers are lower, but are still high, at between 400 and 500 deaths.
More recently, the country made headlines in Brussels with a corruption scandal that bears its name, and which involved the arrest of two EU lawmakers as well as a number of their associates.
Double sense
Gregory Sholette is an artist and academic. He was one of the founders of the Gulf Labor Artist Coalition that tried to raise awareness around the treatment of laborers building the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi.
“Art always gets a sort of double sense,” said Sholette. “One hand, yes, it’s a business, but it’s almost that’s the necessary side of propping up and maintaining and collecting and preserving culture, which somehow transcends capitalism, somehow transcending mere business.”
He said Art Basel’s tie-up with Qatar underscored just how much the supposed timeless quality of art had become entangled in modern finance and big business: “We actually really do see its connection to big business corporations, to the ultra wealthy, to oligarchs, Russian and otherwise. And so I think that contradiction has just kind of become very, very extreme and very, very apparent, and yet it goes on.”
Sholette said that the Basel organizers had to account for how hosting the fair would boost Qatar’s soft power. “It shouldn’t be done willy-nilly, to become part of, in this case, the Qatar political sphere, because that’s what’s going to basically assist Qatar and other countries in that region in their PR promotion.”
The Gulf State was already front and center at this year’s Swiss edition of Art Basel, with a dedicated pavilion in the exclusive collector’s lounge, and with official sponsor branding of its national carrier, Qatar Airways, all around the fair. During the event, Al Mayassa, the emir’s sister, gave a talk at the Beyeler Foundation, a contemporary art museum at the outskirts of Basel.
In an interview with POLITICO, Art Basel CEO Noah Horowitz answered questions about Qatar’s human rights record, and the role that Art Basel might play in helping the country exert its influence internationally. “That’s not a concern of ours,” said Horowitz. “They’ve stepped forward in a very direct and meaningful way for some time now in the role of culture. I mean their cultural commitments are well noted and deep and quite visionary.”
Culture as currency
Art is big business. A report commissioned by UBS together with Art Basel found that in 2024, sales amounted to $57.5 billion. According to the Art Basel organizers, some 88,000 people attended the Swiss edition of the fair this year, including actor and filmmaker James Franco and footballer Michael Ballack. Artworks sell for hundreds of thousands, or even millions, of dollars. This year’s big ticket item was a work by British painter David Hockney, “Mid November Tunnel,” which sold for between $13-17 million, and which depicts a quiet, leaf-strewn country lane.
Collectors form a tight-knit group of high net worth individuals, often the scions of influential business families or working in high finance. Hosting the fair serves both as an important networking opportunity (the fair is sometimes called the Davos of the art world) and as a way for both hosts and guests to establish their cultural bona fides as members of a sophisticated globalized elite.
“The art fairs, and Art Basel in particular, have been very smart in understanding the needs of the new rich people to hang out together,” said Olav Velthius, a professor of sociology at the University of Amsterdam who studies art fairs.
“What all these events, parties, openings, do is provide all kinds of status measures. If you don’t know where you stand as a member of the global elite in the cultural hierarchy you can find out at Art Basel. If you are invited to the most exclusive parties and dinners, you are part of it,” he said.
At the Swiss fair, status markers abound: from what hotel you’re able to book — getting a decent room is notoriously both expensive and difficult during the art week, and having connections helps — to what kind of access card you carry; VIPs get early entrance, while the fair opens to the general public four days later. Collectors get their own lounge on site, closed off to journalists and guarded by concierges in stylish uniforms of baggy white linen.
The rise of contemporary art into a veritable multibillion dollar industry through the 80s and 90s traces the arc of globalization itself. The same forces of international flows of money and people also boosted entrepôts like Dubai, Abu Dhabi and Doha (up to 90 percent of the Qatari population is foreign born).
But the contemporary art world isn’t immune from the vagaries of the global market. According to the UBS report, sales in 2024 fell 12 percent year-on-year as geopolitical risk weighed on buyers’ sentiment. A combination of uncertainty created by U.S. tariffs and a decrease in the value of the dollar means that trend is likely to continue this year.
“There isn’t nearly as strong an appetite for collecting right now, as there has been in the past. I think we’re coming off of a period that started really in around 1980,” said Allan Schwartzman, a New York-based art advisor.
Gallerists interviewed by POLITICO at Art Basel said they were seeing a shift in buying patterns by collectors.
“I’ve been finding that things are becoming more localized,” said Pilar Corrias, the owner of the eponymous gallery in London. “This idea of a uniform, globalized art world where… trends become international is shifting. People are very proud of their own cultural identity and very much support their own identity.”
Culture collides with big business and geopolitics in Art Basel’s partnership with the Gulf State. Simon Denny, a New Zealand artist based in Germany who works on questions of technology and markets, said the art world was still grappling with the retreat from globalization.
“I think the global contemporary art world of the kind that intersects through Art Basel has up until now assumed a broadly ‘liberal’ narrative that underpins it politically,” he said. “As we see new geopolitical narratives emerging in politics — stories of ‘multipolar worlds’, renewed nationalist agendas, pushing back on imaginaries of the global interdependent markets… I wonder how the narratives of this art world will adapt to that.
“I have not seen a clear answer yet to this — maybe that’s something that will take longer to become clear in this community.”
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