On curation as narrative
The new Louvre Abu Dhabi is a masterclass in experience design, offering one true lesson: all stories are told for a reason.
One might be excused for entering the new Louvre Abu Dhabi rather smugly, driven by a morbid curiosity wondering how this preposterous project can be anything but a $1.3 billion dollar ploy by Saudi elite using what they have — money — to buy cultural respect in the west. Welcome. Glad you came. This museum has the perfect exhibit to set you straight.
Narrative is sequencing
The maiden exhibit “Humanity” states a desire to highlight our shared universality. 55 rooms sequenced into 12 chapters and 600 objects (compared with Louvre in Paris’s 35,000 exhibited pieces of art) plays out something much more self-serving: a cunning reminder that when someone tells you a story, they always want something from you. The ultra-modern white on white architecture might suggest open floor-plan. Rooms are instead built to lead from one to another in a very specific order. Try to wander, and a polite guard will help you back on track to safeguard that the experience is consumed exactly as intended.
The opening chapter “The First Villages” offers a false sense of safety. Ancient figurines, tools and craft from far corners of civilization showcasing striking similarities. The archetypal mother with child. Decorated pottery for storage. We are indeed much alike. Nothing controversial here. Next up: “The First Great Powers” and “Great Empires”, early trade-routes and universal religions that lay foundation to civilization as we know it, perhaps correctly assumed forgotten in a more western view of history. A first polite reminder of where you are.
And let’s not forget science
The chapter “Cosmography” celebrates seminal days of science as a natural extension and complemented by religion. Nautical writings by the famous cartographer, Ahmad Bin Majid and a 11th century celestial globe from Morocco takes centerstage. According to Jean-Francoise Charnier, the museum’s scientific director, this section showcases contributions of Arabian explorers, correcting the prevalent history by the West. OK, got it.
As the context grows more explicit room after room, the mid-blowing rarity of the objects collected under a single roof is still perfectly downplayed. They are facts presented, not slogans shouted. By themselves they are artifacts. Curated here, they humbly ask for a place at the cultural table of grown-ups. The lack of pomp however is far more ambitious: let’s be clear, no one else could really pull all this together. And so the real story starts.
Let’s not forget who pays for it all
The connection to the original Musée du Louvre in Paris, from where much art has been sourced, is played out with a clever narrative jujitsu. Is all this simply borrowed taste from Europe paraded by far away royalty with too much money? Yes, of course. But this is exactly why Louvre is the perfect choice. Once we have poured a solid foundation of universality, we are ready for the rooms dedicated to Kings and Queens as patrons of the art. It’s a reminder that the art of the Louvre is not just French but a collection from around the world. Just like here in Abu Dhabi.
In the same chapter, there is also a section dedicated to artists that were allowed residency at the original Louvre. Not the museum mind you, but the royal court. This we are told allowed them to create what otherwise would not be part of this world. Royalty as patrons of the arts, then quickly rushing through that pesky little thing about the French revolution and settling again with all things art in the hands of higher minded adults and the creation of the Louvre as a Museum.
Who inspires whom?
But why stop at leveling the playing field when one can challenge the reigning champion of highbrow and self-obsessed taste: France and the Louvre. All presentation here is done with far more moderation than the French are allowed. The treasures of Europe are humbled by the juxtaposition of other equally magnificent pieces. Nothing is ranked, simply presented together as facts.
Perhaps more to the point: there is no pandering Mona Lisa-equivalent on display to cluster visitors for selfies. Not because they can’t. But because they don’t want to. A Saudi prince did purchase Da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi for 450 million dollars not long ago. The absence of this particular painting is a perfect display of restraint not allowed the French museum, and challenging the supremacy of Mona Lisa in the best way possible.
The curation does what all story should. Instead of preaching, it sequences enough narrative breadcrumbs leading towards a specific conclusion. The audience will fill in the rest and make the story their own. This said, a more explicit sales-pitch could be found in the room dedicated to “Orientalism”. Yes, that orientalism. Wonder about this Arabian fascination with the Louvre? Well then, let the museum remind you of your own fascination with all things oriental, on display at the Louvre in France. A clever, albeit heavy-handed, turning of the tables.
At least modern art is western, right?
The chapter “Challenging Modernism” performs a similar narrative trick not dissimilar to how cult de-programming works: first establishing commonality, and then step by step breaking down the structure upon which we have built our beliefs and opening us up to alternatives. Modernism as we might want to remember it has just three walls in one room containing an unprecedented and dizzying collection of major works by Manet, Monet, Caillebotte and Degas, Whistler, Van Gogh and Cezanne. It’s all there: three walls. If you take a few steps back you can take it all in at once: potentially a new perspective on its relative size and place in world history.
These classics are promptly followed up with more recent scholarship to challenge the predominantly French founders of modernity. Masterworks by Mondrian, Kandinsky, Rothko, Pollock, Warhol and works by the UAE’s Hassan Sharif, the Cuban artist Wifredo Lam and the Sudanese painter Ibrahim El-Salahi are all served up side by side to help visitors decouple art-history from its traditional Western bias.
It’s an ultra conservative and oppressive country, no?
The 12th and final chapter takes on what we might have assumed would be left out: art’s role as challenger of status quo. “A Global Stage” (suddenly “A” not “The” as in less definitive, or one alternative among many) is dedicated to the brave and avant guard— and so we can check it off the list and defuse at least some political absence — dissident art.
Obviously there is no showing of dissident work from the country we are in, as that is punishable by death. Instead another culture conveniently different and far away gives us Ai Weiwei’s crystal Monument to the Third International: the Chinese artist’s take on a never realized 400 meter high Bolshevik shrine. Here, the installation is redressed as a 400 pound chandelier commenting on the discrepancy between party ideals and the elite’s taste for opulence. This discrepancy between doctrine and opulence is likely not an issue in the United Arab Emirates.
The sculpture also resemblance the tower of Babylon, bookending a reminder of our shared roots. And just to be safe, that reaching too far towards true power as the biblical story goes, here in the context of dissidence, will be punished.
The Story Curated
Ai Weiwei’s piece is a fitting display of sparkle to close out the curated experience, transitioning to the architecture of the museum hall were we started: a dome ceiling made of 8 rotating layers of clock-work playing out an ever-changing sky of glittering day-time stars. We return to the museum as context: now hoping to be re-contextualized by the exhibit experienced as an institution promoting the regions role in “cosmopolitan” and “universality” outside the capitalistic and political. The collection is indeed incredible and the deliberate curation a well crafted long play to liberate “refined culture” from western privilege.
At the end, the curation does not push new perspectives or unseen work. The exhibit is purely post-modern. The endeavor is an audacious power-play that can only win what defensive moves can: relying on similarity in historical privilege and brute wealth, not originality, as ticket to the world stage of cultural respect. But then again, the same holds true for the Museum in Paris that started it all. A new Louvre presented through the lens of “Humanity” is the perfect billion dollar tightrope walk and reminder of our cultural universality: both good and bad.
Regardless of politics, the true lesson learned from this masterful curation is one of narrative: that all stories are told for a reason.
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