DIFC, Reflections on Art in the U.A.E.

History is a gallery of pictures in which there are few originals and many copies. 

In a recent article for Vanity Fair—now banned in the U.A.E.—A.A. Gill summed up the most tempting viewpoint (for the cynic, anyway) to espouse about Dubai. "Dubai," Gill writes, "suffers from gigantism—a national inferiority complex that has to make everything bigger and biggest... [It] has been built very fast. The plan was money. The architect was money. The designer was money and the builder was money. And if you ever wondered what money would look like if it were left to its own devices, it’s Dubai." The problem is, I don't know anything about money. My Chinese server, Jake, at Gourmet Burger in the mall beneath one of the Dubai International Financial Centre (DIFC) buildings didn't know there were galleries across the street. And the DIFC behaves like a city in itself, oblivious of the larger city around it.

DIFC. Photo by Adam Levinson.

The DIFC—Dubai's "gateway for capital and investment"—houses several of the United Arab Emirates' leading art galleries—The Empty Quarter, Quadro, XVA, and others. On my first visit, I stared blankly at a few photographs, some urban art videos, and graphs, then spent three hours having coffee. My friend's brother's girlfriend, a gallery assistant at Cuadro, told a story about an Emirati patron who described his living room and furniture in an attempt to find the perfect $75,000 painting to match.

'1306 - 08' from Wounds. Ali Taptik. At Quadro.

As one digs deeper into the national character... one sees that they have sought the value of everything in this world only in the answer to this single question: how much money will it bring in?

Kevin McCoy, the resident artist at NYU Abu Dhabi, and his wife Jennifer had an installation at Postmasters gallery in New York called "Abu Dhabi is Love Forever" that received a great deal of press. When I was helping him set up his independent, apartment exhibition, "No Customs," during the Abu Dhabi Arts Fair, McCoy talked about what he saw as a "missing middle"—the poor students who drag themselves from wine cuppie to wine cuppie in Chelsea, the 'artsy' establishments, the galleries that sell pieces for under four figures, but my half-hearted Thursday in Chelsea this June suggested something else was missing, something more illusive. After my year in the U.A.E., all the iterations of the question "How long can this shitty party go on?" grew nauseating. And the answer at the bottom of every inquiry I'd been digging through the sand to reach was an hourglass. Give it time.

"I Press Help to Search for a Home" from I Command. Gita Meh. At Quadro.

I know of no country in which there is so little independence of mind and real freedom of discussion.*

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*All quotations taken from Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America