17 hours ago
Saudi Arabia's soft power art attack
From roughly the 1970s to the mid-2010s, Saudi Arabia was the stuff of nightmares, referred to now, with understatement, as 'the dark period'. Governed by the austere, brutal credo of the cleric Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab, an 18th century Quran literalist who divided the world into true Muslims (Salafis/Wahhabis) and their mortal enemies, Saudi life was ruled by fear of the omnipresent religious police. Executions were commonplace, TV was banned, women were essentially locked up, and most foreigners and outward travel were blocked.
Wahhabiism has been softened a great deal since then. Since 2017, when the frenetic moderniser Mohammed Bin Salman (MBS) became Crown Prince, a thousand laws have been dropped, and suddenly women, while still second-class citizens, no longer have to cover up or ask a male guardian's permission to leave home. They can also drive and own property (after they turn 21). Many are hoovering up education and plum jobs.
It is hard to demur in the face of all this money and activity. But should we?
Human rights abuses persist in the theocratic monarchy, with show trials, detentions, executions and dodgy treatment of foreign workers. There is no free press or protest culture. The righteous pursuit of consequences for the grisly 2018 state-ordered massacre of Jamal Khashoggi, a journalist critical of the regime, remains entirely blocked.
But the bright, bushy-tailed of the West don't seem too bothered. Once peopled only by doleful Saudis in heavy national dress, the planes to and from Riyadh and Jeddah are full of Americans, Europeans and British travellers, mostly on business but some on holiday. MBS is throwing billions at making Saudi Arabia a plausible luxury holiday destination for Westerners and the great and good, progressive intelligentsia and right-wingers alike are keen to help.
The lefty firebrand Emily Maitlis gushed about a minibreak to Saudi earlier this year, sharing how a former prime minister had prepared her for her trip by saying he had 'never seen anything quite like the Saudi growth experiment before'. Excited, she packed her 'Dries Van Noten floor-length coat and a wide silk headscarf in matching stone', plus 'wide Me+Em jeans'. She also brought an abaya, the full Islamic drapery.
To survivors of the pre-MBS period, such garb might be taken as a symbol of the darkest cruelty towards women outside of Taliban-run Afghanistan. For Maitlis, it was 'a lifesaver for all those moments I want to disappear anonymously into the old city' and allowed her to walk back from the pool 'without revealing an inch of flesh, bikini dripping innocently underneath'. Saucy.
The umbrella for all this fun, both in tourism and sport, is Vision 2030, a master plan intended to keep the party going when the oil music dwindles. Amid all the investment in industry, sport and tourism (Neom, the desert metropolis that includes an enclosed city in a horizontal skyscraper, is costing trillions to develop), the cultural pride of Vision 2030 is the arts bit. The state has mobilised a web of bureaucracies to commission and disseminate Saudi artistic flair at home and abroad. In 2021, its Ministry of Culture claimed that the Kingdom held 100 cultural events put on by 25 cultural organisations, all organised by the Ministry of Culture. It's all a bit like 1984 meets the Guggenheim.
Showpieces of this arts power drive include Riyadh's inaugural Sotheby's sale in February this year, held in the ritzy art colony of Diriyah (an attendee reported serious teething problems due to confusion about an Islamic law to do with auctioneering, which had not been troubleshooted in advance). The Diryah Biennale is in its fourth year; its launch in 2001 saw 1,000 guests, including foreign press and art market stars, crowd the spanking new Diryah Biennale Foundation. Art Week in Riyadh has just concluded, with 45 galleries, private and state collections, while Desert X AlUla, the latter an oasis and ancient trade centre, launched in 2020, with the latest edition of its open-air exhibit titled (somewhat ominously) 'Presence of Absence'.
Abroad, Saudi art, previously a non-entity, is muscling in. The Smithsonian recently announced a partnership with Saudi Arabia to preserve the Kingdom's ancient city of Dadan; following Trump's visit, Saudi is gifting the Smithsonian a pair of rare leopards. Saudi design is, for the first time, now on show at the London Design Biennale at Somerset House (until 29 June) and Saudi craft is on show at Selfridges. The kingdom has become a regular at the Venice Biennale. Last year saw a major exhibition at Sotheby's covering the last 50 years of art in Saudi Arabia, and a Christie's London exhibition by Saudi artist Ahmed Mater. And so on.
What's in it for us? Loadsamoney. But not for free. Saudi money is copiously funding the arts in Paris; a €50 million (£42 million) towards the renovation of the Centre Pompidou accompanies nine new deals that trade French cultural expertise for cash. Starmer is keen to play too; Historic England will offer its expertise to the Saudis, and Britain will push holidays in AlUla, in return for hefty investment here.
There is plenty of private Saudi money in the mix, including the Jameel family's Art Jameel foundation, the Saudi Aramco-sponsored King Abdulaziz Center for World Culture and the Saudi Arts Council. A long-established vector of Anglo-Saudi warmth takes the form of Edge of Arabia (EOA), the brainchild of 'social entrepreneur' Stephen Stapleton and two Saudi artists, Mater and Abdulnasser Gharem, who met in 2003. EOA's first London exhibition took place in 2008 in service of 'encourag[ing] grassroots cultural dialogue in Saudi Arabia and between Saudi Arabia and the Western world'.
It is hard to demur in the face of all this money and activity. But should we? Is it our problem if the freedom of expression of those funded by the kingdom is still limited by conservative Islam? In taking MBS's money, how far and in what ways do we compromise our ethics?
The answer is mixed. In tourism and sport, perhaps, it might be a case of bowing to what is on offer and looking the other way. Art is different, mainly because, unlike the other Gulf states, there does appear to be a sincere and embedded tradition. 'Saudi has the fundamental building blocks for a vibrant cultural scene,' says Princess Alia Al-Senussi, an Ivy League-educated descendant of Libyan royalty, art advisor and co-author of a nifty handbook called Art in Saudi Arabia.
Young artists feel fundamentally Saudi, which is different to many of its neighbours. There is a great sense of pride. It's a vast country [producing diverse art]. What there wasn't before is the multiplication of government projects and agencies that are involving themselves in culture.
She says Saudi artists forced to work elsewhere during the 'dark period' are mostly thrilled to be back, and are, including the likes of women's rights advocate Menal AlDowayan, who represented the kingdom at last year's Venice Biennale, 'deeply patriotic'.
Al-Senussi spoke to me on Zoom (WhatsApp is banned) from an Uber and then the forecourt of the Radisson in Riyadh. She was principally concerned not about artistic freedom but that artists over-commissioned for big government projects might not have time to experiment or 'make mistakes… Every artist needs to be careful with the trajectory of their career – and learn how to say no,' she added. Easier said than done, perhaps.
Before MBS, Saudi's artistic tradition seemed to thrive both in spite of and because of the repressive regime. Sir John Jenkins, British ambassador to Saudi Arabia between 2012 and 2015, told me:
Even in small towns in boondocks, you'd find little photographic exhibitions, a lot of them featured women. As to the question of whether any of it is any good, what I've seen has been pretty derivative, but then I think most western art is pretty crap.
'When I think of Saudi Arabia, I think of the Tudor court, that sort of mixture of high aspiration and brute force,' he says. 'We talk about soft power. Soft power is marvellous. But soft power comes with hard power.' There is no doubting anymore that Saudi is exporting both.
