While art markets in Europe and the United States sputter, a very different story is unfolding on the shores of the Persian Gulf. Dealers, gallerists, and auctioneers speak with something close to awe about the energy coursing through Doha, Dubai, and Riyadh.
Sotheby’s recent expansion into Saudi Arabia and its upcoming auction week in Abu Dhabi, in December, combined with Art Basel’s announcement of a new fair to be held in Qatar in 2026, has led to talk that this is the next foreign oasis—following Russia, Hong Kong, and India—to save the market from one of its perennial downturns. Noah Horowitz, Art Basel’s C.E.O., describes the region to me as a “hyperconnected, multi-hyphenate global mechanism,” which can loosely be translated as “There’s a lot of money sloshing around.”
However, just because Western art businesses decide to move to a region does not necessarily mean a fully functioning art market will follow. Could it all be a mirage?
Charles Pocock has been selling art in Dubai since 2007, where he’s been described as “the mastermind of the [Middle Eastern] market.” He notes that the Sotheby’s auction in Riyadh in February sold only 67 percent of the lots, “which, in anyone’s eyes, is a disaster.” And he is incredulous about the Middle East’s positioning as the market’s next savior. “The client base is less now than it was 10, 15 years ago,” he tells me.
Pocock’s distinctly English charm feels worlds away from Dubai’s Al Quoz Industrial Area 3, where his Meem Gallery occupies a warehouse building that backs onto an eight-lane highway. He opened the gallery in 2007 with Sultan Sooud Al-Qassemi, a member of the Sharjah ruling family.
At that time the small Dubai art market was driven by real-estate investors making hay during the city’s rapid expansion. Now, however, the area’s wealthy have other interests. “[They] want to spend £10,000 in a nightclub on a Saturday and have some Richard Mille watch that cost $200,000 and have a Lamborghini,” says Pocock. “They’re not interested in art at all. They’re all into Bitcoin.”
He’s not alone. Georgina Adam, an editor-at-large at The Art Newspaper, has been visiting the region for decades and believes it lacks the everyday collectors that a thriving market requires. “There are one or two major [individual] buyers”— she mentions Qatar’s Sheikha Al-Mayassa and the House of Nahyan, a ruling royal family in the U.A.E.—“but you can’t build an art market on the basis of two major buyers.”
To outsiders, the deep pockets of Middle Eastern governments suggest a booming market. Abu Dhabi’s $27 billion Saadiyat Island development will house a Louvre and a Guggenheim. In Saudi Arabia, partnerships with the Smithsonian and Centre Pompidou are central to Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s Saudi Vision 2030 project. Leonardo da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi, reportedly purchased by the prince for $450 million in 2017, is supposedly set to anchor a soon-to-open cultural center.
But outside of state buying there’s less encouragement. “You don’t have White Cubes and Gagosians—there’s no place for them here, not yet,” says one art-world insider. “Probably, we’ll grow into it—but nobody knows.” Much of the commercial-art eco-system, an auction-house source tells me, is “either state-funded or funded by sovereign wealth.”
This confusion between the public and private art sectors is unusual. Last week’s announcement of Sotheby’s first Abu Dhabi auctions comes less than a year after the company received a $1 billion investment from a sovereign-wealth fund based there. At the time, it was described by ARTnews as a “lifeline” for the auction house, which has struggled with debt since its 2019 acquisition, by Patrick Drahi.
Similarly, Art Basel Qatar is being launched in partnership with QC+, an arm of the government entity Qatar Museums and the government-operated Qatar Sports Investments, whose portfolio includes the French soccer team Paris Saint-Germain and the World Padel Tour.
When I ask Horowitz about these strange bedfellows, he suggests that the “hybrid setup in Qatar of working with a leading cultural entity and a leading”—he takes a beat before continuing—“sports-and-entertainment investment business is by its nature unique.”
Similarly, Reem Fadda, the director of Abu Dhabi’s Cultural Foundation and overseer of the Abu Dhabi Art Fair, dismisses worries about the market’s reliance on state funding. After two decades of state-backed cultural stimulation, Fadda believes things can go only one way: “You can’t go backwards. You don’t backtrack from that.... It becomes like a wheel that spirals.”
Vilma Jurkute, the executive director of the Dubai arts organization Alserkal Initiatives, agrees that they’re experiencing a “history-making moment, not only for the region, for the world.” One of her tenants, the art dealer William Lawrie, adds that “it’s probably the best time we’ve had in our 15 years of operating,” attributing the success partly to “economic woes in other places” driving the wealthy to Dubai.
When Pocock’s pessimism was shared with them, the responses were mixed. “He has no filter,” was one of the more printable comments.
But how long will Gulf rulers keep subsidizing Western businesses? Saudi Vision 2030—a massively ambitious plan to diversify the oil-dominated economy through entertainment, tourism, and finance—has an end date baked into its name. And if, as some critics allege, the governments of the U.A.E and Saudi Arabia are primarily interested in using art to “wash” their human-rights records, what market can thrive outside of the state’s backing?
Reliance on state goodwill has already caused headaches. Projects often face delays and cancellations—the Frank Gehry–designed Guggenheim Abu Dhabi was slated to open in 2012. Saudi Arabia’s “the Line”— a 105-mile-long linear city—has had its feasibility called into question. In some cases, government clients have been known to ghost galleries expecting their business. “Maybe they should just expect a bit more of that,” one dealer tells me. With oil prices uncertain and Saudi Arabia increasingly focused on the 2034 World Cup, it hardly seems a foundation for a healthy market.
When I ask Pocock why he didn’t share his colleagues’ confidence about the region, he shows me a surgical scar on his neck from cancer surgery in 2006. “One should approach it like a doctor,” he tells me. “Instead of saying, ‘That tumor looks great. Maybe you can accessorize it with an Hermès scarf,’ it’s better to say, ‘It’s not great. We need to do this, we need to do that.”
Unlike the region’s boosters, Pocock thinks the Middle Eastern art market requires government support for dealers, to help “make business flow better,” he says. “A lot of people are quite happy being part of this little bubble, which I think is, long-term, very problematic.”
It’s rare for an art dealer to tell you that business is anything but booming. But if Pocock is right—and the Gulf’s art market is simply a bubble of government spending—then the signs will be obvious. In due course we’ll see closed galleries, abandoned fairs, and the dealers and auctioneers leaving for their next apparent savior.
Phin Jennings writes about art and culture for Frieze, The Guardian, and the Financial Times. He lives in London
