Rethinking the Art World | How Shifting Power Centres Are Redrawing the Art Map

PARIS — The Middle East will be a hot topic at Art Basel Paris this week after a flurry of recent announcements linked to the growth opportunity in the region amid a wider art market malaise.

Just before its flagship London fairs last week, Frieze said it would relaunch the long-floundering Abu Dhabi Art fair next November as Frieze Abu Dhabi. The news came just days after Art Basel unveiled a list of the 87 galleries that will stage solo projects at the inaugural Art Basel Qatar fair in February and London-based Old Masters gallery Colnaghi announced that it would launch an outpost in Riyadh, backed by Saudi private equity firm Sarat Investments Holding.

But the recent surge of activity in the Middle East isn’t an isolated phenomenon. It’s part of a broader shift in which the art world’s power is concentrated as the market continues to globalise.

To be sure, these kinds of art world realignments have happened before. It seems hard to imagine now, but Christie’s chairman François Curiel remembers the early days of his career, when the auction powerhouse did not even have a sales room in New York. Once Christie’s opened in the city in 1977 and started competing with Parke-Bernet (as the US outpost of Sotheby’s was known back then), New York displaced Paris to become one of the art market’s top centres, alongside London.

Since the turn of the century, the art world has become ever-more global. This week, it’s Paris. Last week it was in London. In early September, art insiders were split between South Korea for Frieze Seoul, New York for the Armory Show and São Paulo for the opening of the São Paulo Biennial.

Some parts of the industry are more globalised than others, however.

Sought-after artists now come from virtually anywhere: Mexico, India, Beijing, Brazil, Los Angeles, Leipzig, Ghana. Influential galleries, too, have sprouted up in cities across the world. But the mega-auctions are still highly concentrated in New York, London and Hong Kong. And the art fair brands that dominate the market, Art Basel and Frieze, remain headquartered in Europe.

And yet, powerful new art hubs have taken hold as the economic might of Asia, the rise of post-Brexit Paris and soft power moves in the Gulf have undone the longtime dominance of New York and London, with consequences across the value chain: As new power centres emerge, they spotlight new artists, catalyse new collectors, launch new galleries and attract global players, like Art Basel and Frieze, to set up satellite projects.

The Rise of Asia

The first real power surge in Asia began around 2005, when Chinese collectors became hyper-active: first collecting local artists, driving prices up astronomically, and then collecting Western artists. A flurry of private museums followed, some with real intellectual firepower. “In China you had not only people collecting conventional work but also people who were among the most ambitious globally in terms of buying more conceptual artists like Matthew Barney,” points out top art advisor Allan Schwartzman.

When Christie’s posted Curiel to Hong Kong in 2010 to lead its Asia efforts, the continent represented only 3 percent of the auction house’s global business, he says. Now it’s ten times that.

And if a stagnant Chinese economy has since put a damper on things, hubs elsewhere in Asia are picking up the slack. A 2018 change in the tax law exempting VAT art purchases under 60 million Korean won (about $42,000) had a major impact in South Korea, spurring a boom in private museums, and the market has continued to develop ever since. Southeast Asia’s collectors are becoming more dynamic, too. “Even in Japan, which had been very sleepy for a long time, we’re starting to see interesting new collectors,” Schwartzman says.

Post-Brexit Paris

As Asia’s market matured, Europe’s art sector was roiled by politics, specifically Britain’s shock exit from the European Union, which weakened London’s standing as an art hub to the benefit of Paris, where mega-galleries Hauser & Wirth, David Zwirner and White Cube have since opened new spaces. At Christie’s, Paris sales have roughly doubled since Brexit. “Overall we see more business being done in Europe because Brexit imposed so much more paperwork,” Curiel notes.

But Brexit is only half the story behind the ascendance of Paris. Over the last decade, the private sector has added to the deep roster of public institutions in Paris, most famously Bernard Arnault’s Fondation Louis Vuitton and François Pinault’s Bourse de Commerce, not to mention Galeries Lafayette’s Lafayette Anticipations and the new Jean Nouvel building for Fondation Cartier, which opened Monday.

Indeed, it was this healthy mix of public and private institutions, alongside Brexit, that made Paris an appealing expansion for Art Basel. Also key were the growing ties between art and luxury fashion, which promised meaningful partnerships with luxury brands. (Disclosure: I led the Art Basel Paris bid in 2022.)

Soft Power in the Gulf

Unlike in Paris and key parts of Asia, where private sector activity has been critical, the rise of the Middle East has overwhelmingly been driven by the Gulf region’s ruling families, their governments’ initiatives and the massive sovereign wealth funds that can be deployed to support these strategies.

Each kingdom has played the game slightly differently, as they aim to soften and project their national brands. The Saudis, for example, have brought in a succession of renowned cultural players and organisations to populate their programming including James Turrell, Swizz Beatz and the Desert X Biennial in AlUla, alongside TeamLab in Jeddah. Abu Dhabi has played a similar brand-buying game, but with heavier investments in infrastructure, building museums such as the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi by Frank Gehry and the Louvre Abu Dhabi by Jean Nouvel.

The Qatar Museum Authority has also built major museums, including the spectacular Museum of Islamic Art by I.M. Pei, and Nouvel’s National Museum of Qatar. But until recently it had not brought in Western cultural brands, although the QMA frequently sponsored Western cultural projects. Then, with the Saudis surging forward with their art strategy, Qatar announced its partnership with Art Basel.

The concentrated power of royal families makes it possible to launch major initiatives fast. But it also comes with risk. “What’s complicated is that there’s no real distinction between the families and the government, so the whole cultural ambition of the country depends upon a few people and their interest in art,” says Georgina Adam, whose books “Dark Side of the Boom” and “Big Bucks” both delved deep into the art world’s expansion. “Beyond that you don’t have a real foundation of private collectors.”

While Dubai doesn’t benefit from the same deep pockets of its neighbours, it’s the region’s most international hub and remains the centre of the Middle East’s art market. A single complex, Alserkal Avenue, hosts several Dubai galleries which are internationally active, as well as the Middle Eastern satellites of European galleries such as Perrotin and Waddington Custot. In neighbouring Sharjah, Sheikha Hoor Al-Qasimi has established the Sharjah biennial — and herself — as thought leaders.

A Shifting Centre of Gravity

If today’s art world is still anchored in the West, much of the market’s momentum now lies east of Istanbul. “A lot of the people who are patrons there went to school in the UK or America, so they’re at home in the art world,” says Schwartzman. “And when they get energized by contemporary art they become evangelists. At the moment, we don’t have a lot of those type of people in the US.”

And that dynamism is not just having an impact at home. Last week during Frieze, the two most widely discussed new London institutions, both in Fitzrovia, were not homegrown outfits: the Ibraaz Foundation, funded by Tunisian-Swiss financier Kamel Lazaar and Yan Du Projects, funded by China-born Yan Du and focused on spotlighting Asian and Asian diasporic art.

As for what’s next, the smart money is looking to India, which has the world’s third highest number of billionaires, according to the latest Forbes analysis, which doesn’t even count the significant Indian players of Silicon Valley. “You can build a market with millionaires,” observes Schwartzman. “But a single billionaire can put a whole country on the art world map with a major new museum or arts centre.”

Read “Rethinking the Art World”, a four-part series rolling out this week. Stay tuned as Marc Spiegler, Tim Schneider, Robert Williams and others dive into the industry’s areas of dynamism, as it’s reshaped by new power centres, new forms of patronage and new approaches to creativity.

Plus, subscribe to High Margin by Robert Williams for perspectives on creativity and business in the world of luxury — from fashion and watches to art, wellness, travel and more.