Prior to the first decade of the 21st Century, there was little artistic activity in the Gulf. Some painters and sculptors who had been trained in Cairo or Baghdad (in the Arab modernist style) had formed Fine Arts societies to develop the local art world, but their activities carried little appeal beyond a small circle of intimates.
Only Kuwait and Bahrain seemed to enjoy some kind of contemporary cultural life. The theatre and pop music scenes were admittedly more lively than that of the visual arts. Andy Warhol had an exhibition in Kuwait in 1971, but he was highly dismissive of the art scene he encountered there. Insofar it existed, the art scene in these countries was the result of Palestinian and other Arab immigrants enjoying prosperity and relative freedom. In other countries of the Peninsula, conservative religious values generally made any kind of public self-expression through visual arts problematic.
Contemporary art in the Gulf region is thus a new phenomenon; at the time of writing, it is hardly a decade old. This raises legitimate concerns about how connected it truly is to the region’s culture. First, most of the art professionals in the region are not native, but from the rest of the Arab world (Lebanon, Palestine, Syria, Iraq etc), Iran or Western countries; many of the artists associated with the Gulf similarly have roots in other Arab countries, notably Palestine. Second, the taste for art or artistic skills have generally been acquired abroad. Third, it appears that most of the people that visit artistic events are foreigners.
However, it would be wrong to conclude, on the basis of these observations, that the Gulf art world is thus not authentic. As a counterargument, one could state that important developments in contemporary art anywhere in the world have always been marked by injections from other cultures – think of the hybrid cultural composition of the avant-gardes in Russia in the 1910s, Paris in the 1930s or New York in the 1950s. The percentage of Gulf Arabs participating in this scene may not be high, but it is essential, as will be argued later. Finally, all this is happening in the Gulf region, and the art world there has acquired a distinctive set of characteristics.
It is argued here that the Gulf contemporary visual arts scene is not only authentic, but also that it is intricately linked to the historical cultural development of the region. Indeed, it is seeing art in this wider perspective that makes it a truly exciting object of study. Probably many of the art patrons, curators and artists involved in this scene – or observing it – are intuitively aware of this, whence the general excitement; in the following chapters I hope to give this intuition a solid basis. But let me first sketch the context of the Gulf art world in 2012, as a starting point for our investigations into its backgrounds and dynamics.