Getting ahead in the sand: Universal Museums in the age of neoliberalism

Perhaps it will look like the Starship Enterprise. Or a bagel on stilts. It may be parked on its own island off the coast, or it could even be underwater to be accessed by submarine. But whether it's designed by Skidmore, Owings and Merrell, Herzog and De Meuron, or Zaha Hadid, you can be sure that when it eventually arrives the British Museum's satellite branch in the Gulf will be as bombastic as every other structure rising in the hypertrophied desert megalopolises of Abu Dhabi and Dubai.

The British Museum Press Office expressly denies that Neil MacGregor is in talks with Middle East investors to establish a branch of the British Museum in Dubai or Abu Dhabi along the pattern established by the Louvre and Guggenheim ventures. But surely it's only a matter of time.

I'm afraid having read Mike Davis's recent profile of Dubai in Evil Paradises: Dreamworlds of Neoliberalism, I can't share the enthusiasm expressed by Art World Salon contributor András Szántó who reported his recent trip to the Art Dubai fair for Men's Vogue (A Surrreal Art Scene).

"Highways, bridges, shopping malls, marinas, hotels, and a new metro system being built, day and night, by 25,000 men — all this is coming together right now," writes András. "It's like stepping inside a huge Andreas Gursky photograph." In fact, if András had looked more closely at the domestic circumstances of the 25,000 builders sweating in those murderous desert temperatures to build the expansive marble foyers and refrigerated swimming pools (as Davis has) he might have likened the scene to a photograph by Sebastião Salgado rather than Gursky. That's the real story, not the awful contemporary art that is going down a storm in the desert.

A seismic shift in geopolitics is now under way that looks certain to reconfigure the global hierarchy of cultural values that for 200 years has sustained the hegemony of universal museums. Sensitive to the early tremors, the directors of the world's leading museums are jetting out to the desert cities of Dubai and Abu Dhabi to negotiate satellite versions of their own institutions. Ah, so it's not the collection that's universal. No, it's the brand, stupid.

Dubai's leading tourism expert, Mr. Mohammed Al Geziry, says Dubai is determined to become "the world's leading tourism hub" and is confident of attracting 15 million visitors a year by 2010, almost doubling the numbers from the present 6.5 million a year (London welcomed a record 15.2 million overseas visitors in 2006, 9.4% up on 2005). "The new infrastructure projects and attractions taking shape in the emirate will help Dubai generate more tourism business and attract more visitors from almost every part of the world in the coming years," says Al Geziry.

Entranced by the promise of abundant petrodollars, impoverished European museums are only too eager to dip their fingers into the marble-clad desert honeypot. The Louvre has already signed a 30-year $1.3 billion agreement to build the 'Louvre Abu Dhabi' by French architect Jean Nouvel (left). The 24,000 square-meter flying saucer-shaped branch of the Parisian mothership will go up on Abu Dhabi's Saadiyat Island by 2012. The Guggenheim already has a 30,000 square meter branch there designed by Frank Gehry.

A petition of 4,650 French museum experts objecting to the Louvre plan fell on deaf ears. This was only to be expected after the withering disdain shown by Bizot Group members towards their fellow museum professionals over the infamous Declaration on the Importance and Value of Universal Museums. Like Premiership footballers, the directors of the universal museums see themselves as a class apart, playing by different rules and rarely if ever listening to the referee, or their fans for that matter.

France's Minister of Culture Renaud Donnedieu de Vabres maintains that the 'Louvre Abu Dhabi' will promote the prestige of French culture worldwide. This is disingenuous claptrap. The desert deal could eventually cost close to $2 billion, which is what really matters to the penurious Louvre. Far from promoting French culture, the deal will merely bolster Abu Dhabi's status as a vulgar playground for the rock-stars, billionaire Russian oligarchs, and Iranian gangsters who constitute its primary clientèle.

Perhaps envious of their US and cross-Channel counterparts, UK museum directors are also now heading for the sandpit.

The Natural History Museum in London has for some time been collaborating with overseas investors to build theme parks in Dubai and elsewhere in the Gulf. Even the British Museum is now in talks with Middle East business interests in Dubai and Abu Dhabi, although its press office insists that thus far the talks have focused upon the BM's core objective, which is to contribute to specific exhibitions such as the 'Word into Art, Artists of the Modern Middle East' exhibition at the Dubai International Financial Centre (Shadi Ghadirian's Untitled shown above right).

Viewed in this context the British Museum's continuing intransigence over the Parthenon Marbles is becoming easier to understand, if not to condone.

The Old World Mediterranean-orientated cultural hegemony that has dominated for the last two hundred years will ultimately be overshadowed by the kind of dubious commercially-driven cultural recreations that are beginning to take shape in Dubai, Beijing and elsewhere in the Middle East and Asia.

The proliferation of shops in European and North American museums was merely the first stage in the transfiguration of the museum into something else. Quite what form that will take is anyone's guess, but it will be as far from a European Enlightenment ideal as the high-class prostitutes that service the swanky bars of the vertiginous Burj Al Arab in Dubai.

It perhaps takes a leading museum curator with dual US-French nationality to identify the nature of the changes taking place. Jean-Patrice Marandel, curator of paintings at LACMA, told Didier Rykner of The Art Tribune, "Museums everywhere, be they European or American, are constantly looking for new ways of financing their expenses. American museums cannot criticize the [Louvre] Abou Dhabi project in the name of the same moral principles that outraged many of the major figures in the French museum world. Boston set the example with Nagoya many years ago already. France until now had not been faced with this kind of commercialization of its cultural institutions. It is a fact of the times. In saying it, I am only making an observation and in no way justifying it."

Alexandre Gady, Sorbonne professor and vice-president of Momus, the French association for the protection of national heritage, is even more specific about what's happening. "I deeply feel that the undertaking in Abu Dhabi will be more harmful than beneficial," says Gady, "and I’m not speaking only in financial terms — for our heritage. I’ve always been struck by the monolithic character, practically soviet-like, of French museum management and I watch dumbfounded as it transforms itself suddenly under guise of a pseudo-liberal doctrine in which yesterday’s sacred culture now has strategic market value." (The Art Tribune)