The
Louvre comes to Abu Dhabi
Floating
on a £18bn island, two new museums will make the UAE a global
capital of culture. But are they part of a cynical campaign to put
art in the service of the state or a sign of a more enlightened
future?
Kanishk Tharoor
Wednesday 2 December
2015 06.00 GMT
When they are
finally completed, both the Louvre Abu Dhabi and the Guggenheim Abu
Dhabi will be almost entirely surrounded by water. Perched on the
eastern rim of Saadiyat Island – a monumental £18bn complex that
seeks to turn the capital of the United Arab Emirates into a global
cultural hub – they will look like fantastical chrome-and-glass
atolls, constructions that could have dropped from space to dock on
Abu Dhabi’s shores. Like all statements of power, they suggest an
imperviousness to misfortune elsewhere, floating serenely above the
threat of climate change and rising sea levels. Nothing captures the
strange ambition of these museums better than their location on the
edge of Abu Dhabi, tenuously attached to the mainland by textured
steel.
Saadiyat Island
promises to be a highbrow and high-rolling amusement park, a place to
park your yacht or toddle from green to green in close proximity to
some of the world’s most celebrated art. Its additional frills are
a performance space designed by Zaha Hadid, a marina, a golf course,
exclusive villas and luxury hotels.
The sums involved
are significant by any measure. In 2007, Abu Dhabi signed a deal with
French officials worth over £663m to buy the use of the Louvre’s
name, to construct the Jean Nouvel-designed building that will house
the art, and to facilitate special exhibitions and cultural loans
from French institutions. The museum is scheduled to open next year.
The Louvre branding itself is worth over half the value of the total:
£344m for a period of 30 years.
A similarly
gargantuan sum was promised to the Guggenheim, which will open its
outpost in Abu Dhabi in 2017 or later (the project has been much
delayed). Curators have been granted a £400m budget for new
acquisitions, while the museum designed by Frank Gehry – a medieval
jumble of cones and impossible angles – will cost £530m to build.
It will be 12 times as large as the Guggenheim in Manhattan.
More so than other
bastions of oil wealth in the Gulf, Abu Dhabi has resolutely sought
the cachet of western institutions to boost its international
profile. This is most evident in the world of sports. In 2008, Abu
Dhabi acquired the football club Manchester City. It has since spent
close to £1bn on turning the club into a superpower of the world’s
most popular sporting league. Manchester City’s ground is now known
as the Etihad Stadium, part of a sponsorship deal with Abu Dhabi’s
luxury-besotted airline. The club’s Etihad-emblazoned jerseys can
be found in shops from Manchester to Mumbai. More recently, Abu Dhabi
partnered with the New York Yankees to plonk an Etihad-branded soccer
team in the Big Apple.
The ties to New York
do not end there. Development on Saadiyat Island includes a lavishly
funded and controversial campus of New York University, which aims to
become one of the premier academic centres in the region, granting
the same degrees to Gulf students as it does to New Yorkers. Abu
Dhabi has shouldered the expense of building the new campus, the
construction of which is now complete. Abu Dhabi is also paying the
salaries of the professors brought to teach there, and even
subsidising students’ tuition. (Neither NYU nor Emirati officials
have revealed the full cost of the project, but Abu Dhabi paid an
initial £33m merely to secure NYU’s interest.) Its students and
professors will inhabit a so-called “cultural free zone,” opening
a tiny redoubt of liberal norms of academic free speech in an
otherwise illiberal country. At least allegedly. Earlier this year,
the New York Times reported on limitations to academic freedom in the
UAE, as well as the horrific living conditions of the workers
building the campus. Once back in New York, the reporter found
herself hounded by a private investigator, tasked with discrediting
her.
Ostensibly, the goal
of all this extraordinary expenditure is to transcend oil. The
various galleries and institutions on Saadiyat Island hope to recast
Abu Dhabi as a centre for fine arts and learning. As Crown Prince
Mohammed bin Zayed Al‑Nahyan said at a summit earlier this
year, “Maybe in 50 years, we might have the last barrel of oil. The
question is: will we be sad? If today we are investing in the right
sectors, we will celebrate that moment.”
Even if the project
can seem cloyingly contrived – “saadiyat” is the Arabic word
for happiness – there is a tectonic logic to the expansion of
museums outside Europe and North America. Despite recent misfortunes
in emerging markets and the collapsing price of oil, the west’s
monopoly on power and wealth is eroding inexorably. Other
institutions, in other places, are bound to reshape the international
art world: Hong Kong has already established itself as a key player
in the Asian art market, while new museums from Brazil to Russia to
Singapore have positioned themselves in a thriving global network of
arts institutions, almost all of them devoted to art since 1945.
But why,
specifically, have the Louvre and Guggenheim landed in Abu Dhabi? Who
are the Guggenheim and Louvre actually for? Who will benefit from
Saadiyat Island? Critics of the UAE’s poor treatment of migrant
labourers argue that these museums conceal the repressive conditions
of their construction. In this view, Saadiyat Island is a shop window
for a society that does not exist. Can culture cross borders as
easily – and with the same impunity – as capital? Saadiyat Island
proposes that global museums are like fibre cables, functional
infrastructure that can spread over physical geography heedless of
human geography.
* * *
Announcing its deal
with Abu Dhabi in 2007, the Louvre justified the move by pointing to
the city’s historical and modern cosmopolitanism. A statement on
the Louvre website claims that the museum’s “universal approach
suits Abu Dhabi well, reflecting the city’s position at the
crossroads of east and west, and its vital ancient role in the days
of the Silk Route”. This is a rather bald exaggeration. While the
wider Gulf region has always sat on the trade routes of the Indian
Ocean, Abu Dhabi itself did not exist in any form until 1791, when
the nomadic Bani Yas tribe pitched their tents around a spring. As
many writers have noted, Abu Dhabi is itself only as old as the
Louvre Museum. In 1791, just as the Bani Yas Bedouin were setting
down, the revolutionary National Assembly in Paris decreed that the
royal palace should become a public gallery, which opened two years
later, at the height of the Reign of Terror.
Owning art, for
nations as much as for individuals, signals that you have made it
When oil was
discovered in the region in the 1950s, fewer than 100,000 people
lived in the Emirates, which were then still a British protectorate.
Now the population of the UAE is 9.35 million: a little smaller than
Paris and its environs. Though small, the cities and states of the
Gulf are islands of relative stability in the Middle East, offering
refuge not only to jet-setting upper-class elites and foreign expats,
but to middle-class professionals, scholars and artists from around
the region. This is the more modest way to understand the Gulf’s
epochal ambitions. Where for centuries Damascus, Baghdad, and Cairo
defined the Arab world, oil has tilted the scales of heft and
influence towards the likes of Abu Dhabi and Dubai in the UAE, and
Doha in Qatar.
Both the UAE and
Qatar have increasingly involved themselves in regional
conflagrations, including forays in Libya and Syria. In August, UAE
troops entered Yemen. The UAE ranks fifth in the world in terms of
military spending as a percentage of gross domestic product (just
ahead of Israel). Since the convulsions of the Arab spring of 2011,
both governments have worked hard to stamp out the merest inklings of
dissent, jailing citizens and non-citizens alike. It is therefore a
mistake to imagine the Gulf cities as versions of Singapore or Hong
Kong, placid islands of global capital. The countries of the Gulf are
not simply commercial and financial hubs, but nation-states – with
all the bristling accoutrements that implies.
Visitors to a
pre-opening exhibition at the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi walk through an
installation by Yayoi Kusama Facebook Twitter Pinterest
A pre-opening
exhibition of the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi’s collection included an
installation by Yayoi Kusama, Infinity Mirrored Room – Filled with
the Brilliance of Life. Photograph: Karim Sahib/AFP/Getty Images
Within the UAE,
competition for prestige is fierce. Abu Dhabi may sit on far greater
reserves of fossil fuels than Dubai, but it has long been in the
shadow of its more glamorous neighbour. Abu Dhabi’s slower and
steadier approach hopes to avoid the pitfalls of Dubai’s
boom-and-bust growth.
A more serious
rivalry exists with neighbouring Qatar. Much like Abu Dhabi, Qatar
has pumped money into football to raise its global profile, signing
sponsorship deals with FC Barcelona, a ubiquitous football “brand,”
and revamping the French club Paris Saint-Germain. Qatar was also
controversially awarded the rights to host the 2022 World Cup, the
biggest sporting tournament in the world. That decision may yet be
reversed. Fifa, football’s governing body, is imploding under the
weight of numerous indictments by the US justice department. But it
remains a measure of Qatar’s wealth that a tiny nation of 2.1
million people could host a tournament last held by Brazil, a country
almost 100 times its size.
Unlike Abu Dhabi,
Qatar has not sought the imprimatur of western museums in its
significant forays into the art world. Instead, it is building its
own institutions, with three museums in Doha devoted to regional and
Islamic art, one of which is also designed by Jean Nouvel.
In 2012, the
Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York
each spent around £23m on acquisitions; in the same year, Qatar is
thought to have spent £663m. Under the aegis of the Qatar Museums
Authority, the country has invested £16.5bn in the global art
market, including the remarkable £166m acquisition of Paul Cézanne’s
Card Players in 2011. The campaign has been masterminded by Sheikha
Al-Mayassa bin Khalifa Al-Thani of the Qatari royal family, the
single most important collector worldwide for blue-chip art.
The scale of Qatar’s
acquisitions is excessive, but that is the point. For millennia,
polities have sought to dress their hard power in the softer stuff.
In the 19th century, for instance, a rapidly industrialising United
States heralded its rise on the international stage by amassing art
from Europe and elsewhere, and consecrating museums in such cities as
New York, Boston and Cleveland. The American way of accruing artistic
wealth may have been less bludgeoning than the methods of the past,
but its motivation was the same. Art – or, more properly, the
possession of art – was an assertion of arrival. Owning art, for
nations as much as for individuals, signals that you have made it.
The deals with the
Guggenheim and Louvre form Abu Dhabi’s entry into this age-old arms
race for cultural capital. Emirati officials are conscious of the
arriviste pretensions of Saadiyat Island. As one adviser admitted:
“We have to begin somewhere. We know we cannot create culture
overnight.”
* * *
Mythology, on the
other hand, can be created overnight. A third, less discussed museum
in the Saadiyat complex is named after Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan
Al-Nahyan, the founder of the UAE, and designed by Norman Foster to
resemble a falcon. Billed as a “national museum,” it will
celebrate the history and accomplishments of the Emirates and the
Gulf region. For a sizable fee, the British Museum has scheduled a
tranche of loans to the Zayed National Museum, including Assyrian
royal panels, a mummified falcon from Egypt, Achaemenid silverware,
and a stone Buddha from Afghanistan. This somewhat disparate range of
objects suggests the museum will peddle a familiar story, placing Abu
Dhabi and the UAE at the confluence of ancient networks of trade and
cultural exchange. Of course, Abu Dhabi is barely two centuries old.
Its own archaeological record is meagre. By amassing the historical
culture of the wider region, the museum projects the UAE’s vision
of itself in the present deep into the past. The emergence of the
Emirates as a major international hub is made to seem inexorable.
Proponents of
universal museums – encyclopaedic institutions such as the British
Museum and the Smithsonian, children of the Enlightenment and empire
– deride institutions such as the Zayed National Museum, which
clearly yoke art to the service of a modern political narrative. The
Louvre Abu Dhabi, a universal museum, will sit only a stone’s throw
from the Zayed National Museum. The universal museum, its proponents
insist, puts art in the service of humanity. Such institutions,
traditionally located in the west, act as secure cultural
repositories, keeping civilisation safe in perpetuity. For a number
of museum curators in Europe and North America, the recent
destruction of the ancient ruins of Palmyra reinforced an abiding
belief in the necessity of their collections. With Isis rampaging
through the Middle East, voices in the west insist that Mesopotamian
and Greco-Roman antiquities are better off outside the region than
within. The Louvre Abu Dhabi splits the difference, providing an
opportunity for many people to be introduced to the delights of a
high-quality world museum. (It is far easier, for instance, for south
Asians to travel to the Gulf than to obtain visas to go to Europe.)
It will also make its own small contribution to dismantling the idea
that cosmopolitanism is the preserve of Europe and North America.
François Hollande
speaks with Sheikh Sultan bin Tahnoon Al Nahyan, Abu Dhabi authority
president for tourism and culture Facebook Twitter Pinterest
Fran çois Hollande
with Sheikh Sultan bin Tahnoon Al Nahyan, chairman of the Abu Dhabi
Tourism and Culture Authority. Photograph: Alain Jocard/AFP/Getty
Images
Resembling a flying
saucer that has touched down in the Gulf, the Louvre Abu Dhabi will
be an Emirati museum. It nevertheless has relied heavily on French
guidance, not only from curators and consultants but from organs of
the French state – reaching past the culture ministry to the
diplomatic corps and all the way to three successive presidencies.
(Indeed, the announcement of the Louvre deal with Abu Dhabi coincided
with the building of a French military base in the UAE, and the
Hollande government is currently negotiating the sale of 60 Rafale
fighter jets to Abu Dhabi
The Louvre Abu
Dhabi, its parent institution says, “is intended to be a place of
discovery, exchange and education … It will also play an important
social role in the United Arab Emirates. In this respect, it can be
seen as a product of the 18th-century Enlightenment in Europe.”
With a whiff of the mission civilisatrice, the Louvre in Paris
suggest that its Gulf spinoff will finally bring the Arab world into
the relative modernity of the late 1700s.
It aims, however, to
avoid a western point of view. It will abandon the traditional
taxonomy of the Louvre in Paris and its fellow western museums, which
classify and segment artefacts by region. Its organising principle
will be time, not space. According to museum officials, “the Louvre
Abu Dhabi will be different. Its unique museographic approach –
displaying objects and art chronologically – will explore
connections between seemingly disparate civilisations and culture
around the world. This is what will make the museum truly universal,
transcending geography and nationality.”
It remains critical
to remember that the Louvre Abu Dhabi is not a branch of the Louvre.
It is a new institution, Emirati and not French, that has rented the
name “Louvre” until 2037. It is also renting 300 artworks from
the Louvre, the Musée d’Orsay and other French museums, including
Manet’s Fifer, David’s Napoleon Crossing the Alps, Whistler’s
portrait of his mother, Titian’s Woman with a Mirror, and
Leonardo’s La Belle Ferronnière. (No self-respecting nouveau riche
can be without a Leonardo.) And it has acquired many works of its
own, on the advice of French curators. Critics of the Louvre Abu
Dhabi have warned that a museum in conservative Abu Dhabi may shy
from much of western art history – nudes, notably, or else
paintings of Christian saints – though according to Jean-Luc
Martinez, the Louvre’s soft-spoken new director, the Emiratis
imposed “no censorship … not of themes, not of techniques, not of
countries.”
Nevertheless, the
planned display of Louvre Abu Dhabi is a measure of how much the
Louvre itself has moved from its roots, when as a national museum it
sought to produce an emboldened citizenry. “The ritual task of the
Louvre visitor was to reenact [a] history of genius,” the art
historian Carol Duncan writes, “relive its progress step by step
and, thus enlightened, know himself as a citizen of history’s most
civilised and advanced nation state.” In the 19th century, almost
every western nation established a similar public art museum.
The Louvre Abu
Dhabi, by contrast, will try to conjure the experience of belonging
not to a nation-state or even a civilisation, but to the world. There
is a wonder to the prospect of being able to flit from, say, Han
dynasty pottery to the statuary of Mesoamerica to funerary reliefs
from Sidon. That experience may well produce the kind of “secular
cosmopolitan space” craved by proponents of universal museums. But
there is a clear irony: this post-national presentation is being paid
for and masterminded by a government using art as an instrument of
national power, and the bourgeois values of liberty and individualism
are nowhere to be found in autocratic Abu Dhabi.
That irony extends
to the present day, in the form of the Louvre’s neighbouring
institution of modern and contemporary art. The collection of the
Guggenheim Abu Dhabi will be far more representative of the
non-western world than the collections of other Guggenheim satellites
such as Bilbao. More than half of the collection will be drawn from
the surrounding region. Curators, working from New York, have also
acquired a great deal of work from southeast Asia and other areas not
widely exhibited in traditional western modern art galleries. The
emphasis will be on work produced after 1960, that moment so
synonymous with the eruption of Pop art and minimalism – and, not
coincidentally, the era of the birth of the UAE. Yet again: 50 years
of culture cannot be created overnight, but Abu Dhabi’s mythic
position as a valuable central force in its dissemination and
presentation can.
* *
According to James
Cuno, the cosmopolitanism of universal museums grows naturally from
their urban contexts. He describes the 18th-century London that gave
birth to the British Museum as “one of the world’s largest and
busiest cities, where people and things from all over the world lived
and worked”. Abu Dhabi of the 21st century can be discussed in this
way. The museums of Saadiyat Island trade on the matter-of-fact
globality of the city, its role as an international entrepôt, its
polyglot and multi-faith communities.
But is the mere fact
of Abu Dhabi’s diversity enough to characterise the society that
the Louvre and the Guggenheim will soon call home? For sceptical
outsiders, the glitzy cosmopolitanism of Dubai or Abu Dhabi or Doha
cannot mask the aridity of their illiberal host societies. The UAE,
for instance, restricts personal and political freedoms and operates
what is in effect a 21st-century caste system, stratifying Emirati
citizens, well-heeled foreign professionals, and the huge underclass
of workers from south and south-east Asia. The great divide between
the elite and its subcontracted proletariat lends itself to
caricature, of falconeering sheikhs building their decadent
lifestyles on the backs of migrant labour.
Emirati citizens,
who make up only 11% of the population, enjoy the perks of a generous
welfare state. (A similar situation exists in neighbouring Qatar,
where Qataris make up only 12% of the population.) The UAE’s
legions of migrant workers comprise over half the country’s
population and have no political rights, leaving them vulnerable to
appalling abuses. The Gulf’s kafala (or sponsorship) labour system
relies on the desperation and enormous supply of willing workers from
poorer countries. Foreigners sent home over £19bn in remittances
from the UAE last year. Nearly a fifth of the population of the south
Indian state of Kerala – from which many workers migrate to the
Gulf – receive funds from abroad.
Construction site
of the Louvre Abu Dhabi on Saadiyat Island Facebook Twitter Pinterest
‘Human Rights
Watch and Guardian investigations have revealed that workers
constructing the sparkling complexes on Saadiyat Island have been
treated abysmally.’ Photograph: Caren Firouz/Reuters
By hanging on to the
coattails of famous western museums, Abu Dhabi has at once won more
attention than Qatar and invited more scrutiny upon Saadiyat Island.
Human Rights Watch and Guardian investigations have revealed that
workers constructing the sparkling complexes on Saadiyat Island have
been treated abysmally. They live in squalid conditions, have their
passports confiscated, suffer from wage theft and underpayment, are
deeply indebted, and are denied any rights of organisation. The
reports sparked protests in New York, with activists targeting both
the Guggenheim and New York University.
Both institutions
face pressure from Gulf Labor – a coalition of artists, scholars,
and other concerned individuals – to “assert responsibility for
the wellbeing of these workers”. In a letter to the New York Times
in June, Guggenheim director Richard Armstrong insisted that
conditions on Saadiyat Island had improved in terms of “worker
accommodation, access to medical coverage, grievance procedures and
passport retention”. He nevertheless acknowledged the Guggenheim’s
inability to more broadly affect the political and legal landscape of
the UAE. A recent report released by Gulf Labor found that poor
conditions persist on Saadiyat Island despite a public relations
campaign to highlight a model housing complex for the island’s
workers.
In June, a Pakistani
worker was killed in the process of adding the final touches to
Louvre Abu Dhabi. Emiratis often bristle at the attention that
outsiders place on their labour system. Every country is home to
exploited labour, including the United States, where migrants with
few rights and protections form an enormous and inextricable part of
the economy. Few contemporary building projects in the west, however,
are as deadly as these grand developments in the Gulf, and what is
galling about exploitation in the region is that it is entirely
formalised. The abuse happens with direct legal sanction.
Beyond the material
circumstances of the building of the museums, the UAE’s
overwhelming reliance on migrant labour poses another important
question. Museums such as the Louvre and the Guggenheim emerged in
Paris and New York with the aim of serving the public. They enshrined
the belief that art was a common good, and that museums could help
foster an enlightened and humane society. How can that original
mission be translated to a place with no clear sense of a public,
where citizens and expatriates lead lives so utterly separate from
and different from those of the great body of workers?
Despite the
nationalist aims of Abu Dhabi’s museum construction, the “audience”
envisioned for the museums of Saadiyat Island is palpably not a
national one. Armstrong has talked up the number of tourists that
come through the region, noting that the expansion of Abu Dhabi’s
airport will soon allow it to handle the traffic of 45 million
passengers annually. Thanks to their useful location between Asia,
Africa and the west, airports in the Gulf have already supplanted
many of their European counterparts in funnelling people around the
world. Saadiyat Island will be the ultimate stopover destination. Its
museums will cater to the worldly sensibilities of travellers,
condensing the global in the Guggenheim’s cones and in the Louvre’s
spiralling corridors.
Saadiyat Island is
unquestionably a vanity project – aspiration inflated to monumental
proportions
Abu Dhabi officials
talk vaguely about the connection between the museums and their
domestic society. One curator confessed to the New York Times that
“it will take one or two generations before a museum like the
Guggenheim Abu Dhabi will soak into the quotidian part of life … It
will take a while to feel internalised and natural.”
But internalised and
natural to whom? The sliver of the population who are citizens?
Surely not the nearly five million south Asian migrants, many of whom
lead immiserated lives in segregated camps, bunked in sweltering
cabins? The curious truth about Abu Dhabi’s grand projects – from
Saadiyat Island to the English-language newspaper The National – is
that they presume an interested civil society that does not exist and
cannot easily be magicked into existence. They must operate above and
beyond the level of “the local” precisely because the local is
too small and too segmented to be a meaningful constituency.
Saadiyat Island
should be judged in this harsher light. It is unquestionably a vanity
project, aspiration inflated to monumental proportions. It promises a
recreational and educational idyll made for glossy magazines. Of
course, many fine and serious minds are right now researching
acquisitions and devising exhibitions for the new Guggenheim and
Louvre. That work does not deserve to be denigrated, but the
enterprise that that work serves was not conceived in the classroom
or the studio, but in the boardroom and the business-class lounge.
* * *
When the French
revolutionaries summoned it into existence in 1791, the Louvre in
Paris marked a clear break from the past. The Louvre smashed apart
the old tradition of cabinets of curiosities and of princely
collections, which served primarily to dazzle visitors, glorify the
monarchs who owned them, and solidify their claims to rule. The
Louvre, by contrast, laid out paintings and sculptures in a
procession of art-historical schools, each of which expressed a
national or cultural “genius”, and addressed visitors not as
aristocratic connoisseurs but as citizens. The museum sought to serve
a public that, however shadowed by the spectre of the nation, was
imagined in the broadest terms.
Interior of the
Louvre, Paris Facebook Twitter Pinterest
‘The Louvre
addressed visitors not as aristocratic connoisseurs but as citizens.’
Photograph: Guido Cozzi/Atlantide Phototravel/Corbis
Without this clear
relationship between art and society, the museums on Saadiyat Island
turn back the clock. They may adopt sophisticated museographic
practices and cherry-pick from the latest trends in cultural theory,
but their main aim is to dazzle and awe, to plump the reputation of
Abu Dhabi and its rulers. Western museums have been only too happy to
abet this project and lap up the largesse of the Gulf. For the
Etihad-pampered visitors to Saadiyat Island, the effect of touring
its galleries will be much like that of seeing the royal collections
of the 17th and 18th centuries. All the wonders they encounter within
will be refracted through the inescapable power of the king.
It is unfortunate
that the first museum to break the west’s monopoly of the universal
is so ethically flawed. The likes of James Cuno, head of the Getty,
and Neil MacGregor, departing chief of the British Museum, are right
to emphasise the need for humanist institutions like theirs in a time
when information technology, global capital, and resurgent
chauvinisms shove people both together and apart. Yet lifting the
universal museum from its bedrock of western privilege remains a
major challenge. (We should not sniff at online dissemination of art,
but it still insists on the grossly unfair divide between people who
get to experience art intimately, on the other side of the glass, and
people who will only ever see that art from a remove, pixellated on
the screen.)
Universal museums
will never be evenly distributed around the world. The same legal and
political conditions that limit the directors of the great western
museums will make it hard for museums in Asia, Africa, and Latin
America to build their own diverse collections. The laissez-faire
norms of the 19th and early 20th centuries have given way to a more
rigid system of cultural exchange, in which would-be curators cannot
imitate their European forebears in happily relieving the world of
its cultural patrimony. The best they can hope for is a trickle of
expensive and grudging loans from institutions in the west.
Short of a Met in
every middling metropolis, an ideal future for the universal museum
might look something like this. It would be constantly in motion,
moving from country to country as a touring exhibition of the world’s
cultural patrimony. Like the Louvre Abu Dhabi, it would be organised
chronologically, avoiding the taxonomy of region and civilisation.
People in Lagos and Lima might walk its halls, studying the
intricacies of Safavid chainmail or the unfurling of Chinese
landscapes, and feel as much of a claim to those objects as Londoners
do now. This roving caravan of marvels would be a logistical
nightmare and a financial impossibility, but it would best express
the ethos of the global museum, free of the bedevilling complications
of place.
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A longer version of
this article initially appeared in Even, a contemporary art magazine
based in New York. More information can be found at evenmagazine.com
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