Skip the Vatican Museum. Go to the National Museum of Qatar.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/07/opinion/national-museum-qatar-art.html

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DOHA, Qatar — The future of the art world may be in a vast desert landscape where audacious museums are melding both local culture and the outside world in a way that feels fresh and revolutionary.

The cities of the Gulf region — the modern-day, sun-draped Gothams with their skyscrapers that have sprouted up like weeds — are home to some of the world’s newest and newly appreciated museums, visual arts scenes and even opera houses. By being thrust forward in time at warp speed over the last few decades — fueled by seriously cranked-up air-conditioning and the bountiful oil production from beneath their deserts that began ramping up in the 1950s — these traffic- and heat-fueled metropolises have the space, desire and revenue to help create the new frontier for arts and culture.

And what feels futuristic is the way in which museums are being conceived and curated, particularly through impressive technological advances. Galleries are embracing not only pre-Islamic art and culture where it was forbidden for centuries, but also contemporary global art, creating an array of works to take in.

That mash-up of sensibilities also lies at the core of global criticism surrounding human rights violations in the region, from the exploitation of laborers from Asian and African countries to discrimination against gays and women. Those issues are at the heart of the region’s growing pains: Who dictates how countries should change, and at what speed? And do we avoid those countries, or do we support their emergence as global arts and tourism centers and therefore help instigate change?

Over the past three years, I’ve spent several weeks in the region, often to break up trips between my home in China and trips to Europe and America. In these gleaming Gulf cities, I could feel the excitement of the arrival of new venues and the love of Western art, as the youth of the Gulf region embrace its wealth and the curiosity of the outside world, brought on largely by social media. Richard Serra’s stark and towering “East-West, West-East” steel sculptures in a Mars-like remote setting outside Doha and the just-closed exhibition of the American artist KAWS (not to mention his huge pieces that dot the country’s cutting-edge main airport) come to mind.

This region feels far removed from and yet far ahead of the pilgrimage sites — and their debilitating crowds — of selfie-obsessed tourism across Europe and America. To go from the new jaw-dropping National Museum of Qatar to the mosh pit that has become the Vatican Museum within one week, as I did this fall, was pure culture shock.

Yes, perhaps it is unfair to compare these Gulf city spaces to, say, the Sistine Chapel or the Louvre as a traveler’s rite of passage. On a global scale Western art is more championed and promoted — perhaps overly so, sheerly for reasons of commercialism — often to the detriment of nonwhite art throughout the Arab world and Africa.

But it raises the question of what draws us to museums: Is it simply for bragging rights to show everyone how worldly (or Instagram-savvy) we are? Or is it to learn about different cultures, histories and religions?

In the Middle East, these new museums and performing arts spaces also show off the latest designs by celebrity architects and the earthshaking cultural shifts in a historically rigid and isolated part of the world.

Nowhere is that more clear than in Qatar, the Connecticut-size appendage off the east coast of the Arabian Peninsula that has been positioning itself as a major arts center nearly three years ahead of its official arrival on the world stage with the World Cup in 2022, albeit with a few concerns. And its neighbors — the Louvre Abu Dhabi and the Royal Opera House Muscat in Oman, for two stunning examples — are joining in to transform the region, and perhaps global culture at large.

One could argue that the overrun museums of Europe — the Accademia in Florence, for instance — are pilgrimage sites much like the flashy exhibitions that have become the new rock concerts of the cultural world, many of which seem to exist only to keep Western museums alive. The “Tutankhamun: Treasures of the Golden Pharoah” exhibit, which in November opened to ecstatic reviews at the Saatchi Gallery in London, is a case in point: More than one million visitors are expected before it closes in May, at a cost of up to £28.50 (about $37) per person.

And many exhibitions are starting to feel like gawkfests: wedging oneself between others or standing tippy-toe over shoulders to see a Vincent van Gogh or Edward Hopper painting as if trying, desperately, to get a glimpse of a car wreck or the fleeting celebrity sighting. It hardly feels like art consideration and consumption when you’re being shoved along an assembly line.

Yet at the National Museum of Qatar (designed by the architect Jean Nouvel, who also designed the two-year-old Louvre Abu Dhabi) the crowds are thin, the rooms are quiet and rich with history and there are mercifully far fewer selfie sticks, for the most part. The museum opened in March, and it is what subsequent galleries should be measured by. It is not a trophy case of artwork obtained by rich sultans or kings but a museum that truly charts the nation, tracing its origins from a no man’s land to its Bedouin and pearl fishing history and then to its post-oil transformation to one of the richest countries in the world.

Designed after the famous desert rose, which is actually a local desert gypsum crystal that grows in the shape of rose petals, its 76,000 panels are rounded and hoisted like saucers — as if the teacups on the Mad Tea Party ride at Disneyland had spun out of control and clustered into one another. The swirling image of its facade from the nearby main road creates a mood for what’s inside: 430,000 square feet of audaciously displayed and slickly produced videos and audio visuals, as well as recreations of Bedouin life and ancient tools, costumes and artifacts.

This is no stodgy room of sculptures and religious paintings with a bored security guard stuffed in a corner. Clocking in more than 450,000 visitors since it opened in March (more than 70 percent of whom were Qatari), the National Museum of Qatar documents the country’s history not through paintings and sculptures but with 21st-century lights, sounds and visuals.

At the nearby Museum of Islamic Art (built in 2008 and designed by I.M. Pei), plans include a major overhaul of the descriptions that accompany the ancient Islamic artwork. On a recent walk around the museum, its director, Julia Gonnella, described how the museum is planning a more interactive and educational experience before the World Cup and the crowds arrive in 2022.

“The story line of Islamic art will be completely different and more meaningful since we’ll trace the history of its oral roots to when paper was introduced in the 8th century to the spread of religion from Al-Andalus to Southeast Asia,” she explained. “This is a geographical story.”

And the museums in Qatar see the World Cup — and the nearly three years leading up to it — as the time to make a distinct mark on world art.

“We want to be different from European museums,” Ms. Gonnella said. “We are in the Middle East, and it should be from that perspective. We are telling the story from this part of the world,”

“It’s a bit of a show-off thing, in a way,” she added. “You want to show the contribution of the Islamic world to world heritage.”

This idea is also evident at the Arab Museum of Modern Art. In an unassuming building on the other side of Doha in the shadows of one of several massive World Cup stadiums under construction, the Ghanaian artist El Anatsui is the subject of an exhibition looking back on his 50-year career of vast sculptures of wood, bottle caps and fabric. It’s typical of the little-known museum’s offerings of celebrated international artists, some critical of political governments throughout the Muslim world. (Granted, one doesn’t expect to see a Robert Mapplethorpe retrospective in these parts any time soon — we know what happened in Cincinnati nearly 30 years ago when a curator faced up to a year in jail for sexually explicit material.)

Performing arts venues in the region are similarly forward-looking. The Royal Opera Muscat, in the capital of Oman, is the kind of opera house that would have been built in the 19th century as the show-off piece of, say, a European capital of culture. Built nearly 10 years ago with soaring Byzantine-style architecture and a lobby that rivals the great opera houses of the world, it also hosts some major opera singers. (The A-list performers Erwin Schrott and Olga Peretyatko starred in a production of Donizetti’s “Anna Bolena” last fall.)

But even though it is a true opera house — unlike the so-called opera house in nearby Dubai, which is more like a performing arts center that hosts the occasional road show opera productions — the Royal Opera Muscat has a lineup that includes music native to Oman as well as music from around the world. A Bollywood musical in October lured the country’s vast Indian immigrant population.

And the future of arts in this region is dizzying: An Italian-style opera house is planned for the port city of Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, along with a recent announcement of a major modern art museum planned in the capital, Riyadh. The long-delayed Guggenheim Museum in Abu Dhabi, designed by Frank Gehry, is apparently back on track. And the appropriately named Museum of the Future in Dubai is set to open in time for the city’s Expo 2020 in September.

In a world where tourism is focused squarely on rehashing the familiar artwork and destinations — be it on social media or in social studies classes — this region feels not only like the way forward artistically but also, perhaps, a path toward enlightenment and greater understanding. Visiting these spaces feels like being onto something new — not a treadmill museum jaunt, but a private education about a part of the world many of us should learn about or experience.

David Belcher is an Op-Ed staff editor who writes frequently about culture and the arts.

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