Dubai's art market

Dubai’s art market is no longer news, and this is great news. The market has been progressively increasing in volume and value thanks to a group of extremely brave individuals, galleries and institutions who were essentially developing a cultural framework of the highest professional standard from dust in merely 15 years. How? The obvious reply is money, and to a certain extent it is true; art history is there to prove the weight of trade, banking and industry in Florence, Venice, Paris, New York, London and Hong Kong in the development of the past 600 years of art history. But you need a lot more substance than just cash to deliver the quality you can currently expect in galleries and museums in the UAE; you need imagination, knowledge, faith and perseverance. All of which you cannot find everywhere, or even buy.

Work by Lantian Xie Via Grey Noise

As said, Dubai’s art market is no longer a surprise; collectors, galleries, auction houses, curators, and museum directors in the Emirates have made this notable in a record-breaking time. Yet, despite the hard work and extraordinary result, Dubai still carries the “regional” label which reverberates as an outer nuanced tag of exoticism. Of course, in value and volume, Dubai cannot compete with any of the big hubs in the East and the West, but from an aesthetic and cultural point of view, we fail to understand that not only is Dubai the cultural capital of a region that has shaped and developed both poles, but is increasingly gaining an immense international position. Right now Dubai’s cultural industry controls an area of influence that goes from Morocco to India, and from Turkey to Somalia. Whether it is religion, history, culture, trade or migration, the fact is either one of these, some or all of the above have made of Dubai one of the most imminent cultural capitals in the world, where one could have the privilege of admiring a different perspective on certain key aspects which, by the way, have been shaping a good proportion of the world for the past two centuries. And the good part of being a giant under the radar is that you could still buy incredible works by highly validated artists for a fraction of their counterparts in New York, London or Hong Kong. There is still a long way to go for Dubai to become categorically as big, but the accomplishments and power of influence it has gained in a record-breaking time could only mean it could be closer than what most would expect. Just a month ago, Nabila Abdel Nabi became the first Middle Eastern curator of Tate Modern… now, where do you think she will go fishing?