Traditional robes and headdresses far outnumbered Armani suits and designer sneakers. No one was sipping Champagne. No one was complaining about the crowds. People even had the time to talk about the art.
Art Basel’s new fair in Doha, Qatar, was always going to be something a bit different.
With just 87 exhibitors from 31 countries and territories, this five-day event, which opened to V.I.P.s on Tuesday, was smaller in scale than the four other fairs in the Art Basel global portfolio, all of which feature more than 200 dealers.
The display was radically different, too. Rather than the usual mall-like crush of booths showing a range of works, exhibitors were asked to make presentations by a single artist that responded to an overall theme, “Becoming.” The curatorial concept was overseen by the fair’s Egyptian artistic director, Wael Shawky.
Most importantly, more than half the exhibited artists were from the Middle East, North Africa or South Asia, giving visitors an opportunity to discover fresh voices outside the echo chamber of mainstream international art fairs. Many European and American dealers also showed artists from outside the West.
“It’s like a biennial, not a commercial art fair,” said the Italian collector and patron Patrizia Sandretto Re Rebaudengo. “It’s a great opportunity to discover artists from this part of the world. I know about China; I didn’t know there were so many good artists in Saudi Arabia.”
The Middle East has a reputation in the art trade for deep wealth but a thin collector base. Art Basel’s chief executive, Noah Horowitz, said he was wary of being overambitious in the region. “We had to start smaller to set up for sustainable success,” he said.
He stressed that Art Basel planned to expand the fair in the future and was looking to maintain its presence in the region for more than five years.
Horowitz said that Art Basel Qatar was “a partnership” between his organization, Qatar Sports Investments and the Qatari cultural strategy body QC+, although he declined to comment on the financial arrangements between the partners.
“Qatar has huge go-ahead plans,” Horowitz added, barely an hour after Qatar Museums had announced that it would host a new quadrennial of contemporary art in Doha, opening in November to coincide with the first edition of the Frieze Abu Dhabi fair.
“Art Basel has come up with a new concept that’s right for here,” said Iwan Wirth, a co-founder of the Zurich-based dealership Hauser & Wirth, in an interview at the gallery’s booth in Doha. His is one of a select group of international galleries that exhibits at all Art Basel events. In Qatar, Hauser & Wirth was presenting three high-quality Philip Guston paintings from the 1970s, priced from $9.5 million to $14 million.
Wirth said he hoped to find a new audience for the works in Doha. “It’s like fishing,” he added. “We’ve come to a fresh pool. We’re meeting people who have never been to an art fair before.”
With its small population of just over three million and vast natural gas reserves, Qatar has the highest level of purchasing power per capita in the Gulf, according to the International Monetary Fund.
Over the last 20 years, the ruling emir’s sister, Sheikha al Mayassa bint Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani, has overseen a huge investment in art acquisition and museum-building in Qatar. But, as exhibitors and visitors pointed out, until now the country has developed little in the way of an art market infrastructure.
“Art Basel Qatar is a big statement — it shows the region’s commitment to culture and supporting art,” said Elie Khouri, an Emirates-based Lebanese collector who is creating a private art foundation in Dubai. ”We hope it will encourage collectors to buy.”
Khouri said on Tuesday that he had bought one work and reserved two others with a total value of $2 million. He added that the number of art buyers in the region at this kind of price level was still fairly limited — “but it is growing.”
For now, the most important collectors in Qatar come from the extended Al Thani family, whose wealth is valued at about $200 billion. Yet, while a Hollywood royal like Angelina Jolie was spotted at the Tuesday preview, there was no sign of Qatar’s rulers during the V.I.P. days.
“They were here yesterday,” Philip Hoffman, an art adviser, said on Tuesday, referring to a pre-preview that the Qatar royals had enjoyed and recorded on Instagram.
“It’s a big family,” Hoffman said. “There are about 20 that buy the very top of the top, then another 50 younger-generation collectors who buy at a lower level.”
Several dealers said that the Qatari royal family and its museums had reserved works during the preview, but that sales would not be confirmed until a later unspecified time.
Among the reserved pieces were a wall installation by the Saudi Arabian artist Maha Malluh, priced at around $80,000 by the Vienna-based gallery Krinzinger; a mixed-media piece by Shigeko Kubota commemorating a 1968 chess game between Marcel Duchamp and John Cage, offered by Fergus McCaffrey of New York at $850,000; and a monumental textile sculpture by the Qatari artist Bouthayna Al Muftah at the Doha-based Al Markhiya gallery, for $285,000.
Unlike at other editions of Art Basel, or of its rival Frieze, the first preview day didn’t end with participating dealers releasing lists of sales for the news media. Exhibitors were having to wait until reservations turned into confirmed sales, and in some instances dealers said they had accepted multiple offers in case their key Middle Eastern clients changed their minds. This created the impression that sales were a lot slower than at Art Basel’s other fairs.
In Doha, the London-based dealer Niru Ratnam was showing “The Stream,” a 2022 video sculpture by Kutlug Ataman, an artist who was shortlisted for the 2004 Turner Prize in Britain but later dropped out of the art world to run a farm in Turkey. It was priced at $250,000, and Ratnam said it had been reserved. When would the sale be confirmed?
“We’re all wondering that,” Ratnam said. “You tell me.”
Scott Reyburn is a London-based freelance journalist who writes about the art world, artists and their markets.
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