The Louvre, the Prado, or the Uffizi: the most important exhibition venues in the world are currently located in Western metropolises. However, the art meccas of tomorrow are emerging chiefly in the Gulf states and the Asia-Pacific region.
Museums in the desert, visions of art centers in places where only fishermen lived until a couple of years ago: until just recently, people in the West still smiled at such supposedly pretentious and inadequate initiatives directed at tourists. Now, however, even the harshest critics have to admit that the strategic developments, the new centers of cultural power, are not originating here in Europe, not in the United States, but in the Gulf states and the Asia-Pacific region.
The media time and again tout it as a small sensation when at international art auctions another record object goes for hundreds of millions of dollars to Qatar, Abu Dhabi, or to a collector in Singapore, Hong Kong, or Shanghai. Western museums or countries have long since ceased to be serious buyers in this category of first-class works.
In reality it is not just a matter of getting hold of the best and most expensive works of art currently on the market. The auction records conceal a much more consequential development: a regional art market is forming in East Asia and the Gulf states; a transshipment-center structure is being established; duty-except storehouses are developing; art fairs, curator schools, biennials, universities are being founded.
Like in other branches (for example Qatar's role at VW, the Deutsche Bank, Barclays, or the soccer club Paris St. Germain), in order to increase their influence the Gulf states are increasingly in evidence as sponsors of cultural events in London, New York, Paris, and elsewhere, and are becoming a key power factor worldwide in the financing and facilitation of art.
Several years ago, the outstanding Museum of Islamic Art, designed by the star architect I. M. Pei, opened its doors in Doha, and the Arab Museum of Modern Art is in an intense state of development. Within a short space of time, the sheika, the emir's sister, succeeded in assembling a substantial collection of contemporary art. A large-scale exhibition recently opened, including a gigantic permanent installation by the American artist Richard Serra.
For two or three years now, Qatar has been regarded as the largest superpower on the art market for top lots. A presentation entitled "The Birth of a Museum" of the first 160 masterpieces acquired for the collection of the Louvre Abu Dhabi, opening on Saadiyat Island in 2015, is currently taking place at the Louvre in Paris. The Parisian public is filled with wonder over the Old Masters as well as the Manets, Magrittes, Gauguins, Twomblys, and Picassos whose new home will be in the desert country.
Another, even more gigantic complex comprising cultural land reclamation and a multiple infrastructure of museums and venues for the performing arts is also originating in the West Kowloon Cultural District of Hong Kong. The second edition of Art Basel Hong Kong has shown that the principal driving forces of the world's art market are in Asia.
This development is remarkably reminiscent of the time a hundred years ago when the money aristocracy in the United States struck out to found the Museum of Modern Art (1929) and the Guggenheim Museum (1939). In Europe, this was initially not seen as a serious institutional threat. Today, these American institutions are the most outstanding of their kind, and New York has been the center of the international art market and the global cultural scene for more than sixty years. At present, new, potent, strategically minded forces are emerging; a further fundamental change is about to take place.