By James Westcott

In a corner of a wing, just off an atrium, of the enormous and oppressively luxurious Palace Hotel in Abu Dhabi, there’s an exhibition about what will sustain the United Arab Emirates after oil: culture. Saadiyat, an uninhabited island off Abu Dhabi about half the size of Manhattan, is where culture will happen.

Abu Dhabi is making a $27 billion bet on it, building a Guggenheim by Frank Gehry,
a Louvre by Jean Nouvel,

a performing arts centre by Zaha Hadid,

a maritime musuem by Tadao Ando and a National Museum by Norman Foster, dedicated to the late Sheikh Zayed Bin Sultan Al Nahyan. There'll also be a Biennale Park with 17 pavilions, by younger architects like Greg Lynn and David Adjaye, and each of them are expected to be mini-masterpieces themselves. The island will have housing, hotels, and golf courses.
Saadiyat (meaning isle of happiness) is an almost ridiculously ambitious cultural undertaking -- the Guggenheim Abu Dahbi is scheduled to open just four years from now -- on a perhaps unprecedented world-historical scale for a single unified project. Despite the superficial bombast of the project and seeming decadence in the relentless demand for WOW!, Saadiyat is also responsible and forward-planning. The United Arab Emirates, from Sharjah to Abu Dabi, is hurriedly trying to reorientate its economy away from oil, anticipating the day when it will run out. In 1980, three-quarters of Abu Dhabi's enormous GDP was based on petroleum and natural gas. Now it's down to a third. To save the other two-thirds of economic activity being just a soup of five star hotels and shopping malls, Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan is calling on culture to give a root and an anchor for future civic development. Abu Dhabi is also drafting in New York University and and the New York Film Academy to set up shop. Fifty-one per cent of the UAE's 4 million inhabitants are under 20, and they won't be able to live on oil alone.

It is more than churlish -- more like reactionary, snobbish and close-minded -- to dismiss Abu Dhabi's investment in culture as nothing an oil-soaked publicity stunt or a cynical gamble, as many critics have done. There was uproar in French cultural circles last year when the Louvre collaboration was announced: more than 2,000 museum people signed a petition proclaiming that France's art is not for sale (Abu Dhabi paid the Louvre around £500 million for the use of its name and access to its collections). And there was the pretense of outrage -- or at least provocation -- in recent reports that the Guggenheim will not have sovereign control over what gets exhibited and collected in Abu Dhabi (this is actually the same arrangement they have in Bilbao), and in the hardly surprising news that nudity and religious references will not be allowed in the art on Saadiyat. (This is an Islamic and feudal regime after all.) But censorship is only a superficial shackle on a project that could be more radical and far reaching than even its sponsors realise. Condemning the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi in a flush of western self-righteousness would be the worst possible response to a project that has ambition, investment, confidence and above all a faith in the power of art to transform society that could never be mustered in Western Europe or the US.
Near the beginning of The Man Without Content, Giorgio Agamben writes: "Only because art has left the sphere of interest to become merely interesting do we welcome it so warmly." Agamben notes how Plato thought art was so subversively powerful that we should banish poets from the city. A side effect -- or maybe an unspoken condition -- of today's global boom in contemporary art and the public's acceptance of its language is that art doesn't actually have any social agency. Yet in Saadiyat we might be looking at a more ancient and exciting situation, where the instrumentalisation of art and culture -- which on the one hand is a simple economic calcualation -- also carries the potential for art to be of interest, and to change society.

Despite the radical infrastructural and social ambition of this mega-project, on a practical level Saadiyat has the ache of a missed opportunity. It is excruciatingly disappointing that, given the carte blanche of a desert island and apparently limitless funds, Abu Dhabi is trying for nothing more than the instant recreation of the greatest hits of the 20th century, rather than investigating new possibilities for the fostering and expression of culture. It's a shame that Sheikh Khalifa didn't feel like looking beyond with the stellar Guggenheim + Gehry formula that turned Bilbao into a booster town. And an outpost of a western encyclopedic museum also feels like a safe bet. The first ever biennale park, Venice's Giardini, is now almost universally criticised as an outmoded way of experiencing and classifying art. So why build a new one? Saadiyat's pavilions probably won't be based on nation states, but the weight of these purpose-built architectural jewels risks crushing whatever art might be summoned to fill them every two years. And why insist on staging a new Biennale? As a display board notes, there are 130 in the world already. If anything, that signifies that Biennale culture has reached its apex. New and different exhibition models will emerge in the 21st century (we hope). Why not plan for them and pre-empt them in this utopia of culture?
Exactly because it is a utopia, you feel that Saadiyat lacks (for now) the crucial ingredients that generate culture: friction, agitation, accidents. But is has optimism in excess, and a masterplan that may end up mastering the planners. Given time, the Abu Dhabi effect could end up making the Bilbao effect look small fry.