← New Books Network
New Books Network
Beth Derderian, "Art Capital: Museum Politics and the Making of the Louvre Abu Dhabi" (Stanford UP, 2026)
00:31:19
Loading summary
Transcript24 lines
- [00:00]
A
Hey, sorry to interrupt your playlist, but real quick. This might be better than music. We're talking free stuff. Yep, actually free. Just download TikTok, search free, pick items you want, share the link, and watch the price drop to zero. Your song will be waiting. Your free Items won't open TikTok and start slashing now.
- [00:32]
B
Hey NBN listeners. We're running our 2026 New Books Network audience survey, and we'd love just a few minutes of your time. NBN has been bringing you in depth conversations with authors and scholars for over 15 years. We haven't done a comprehensive audience survey since 2022, and a lot has changed since then. It's time to hear from you again. Here's why we're asking. We want to understand who's listening, what subjects and podcasts you love most, and where you'd like to see us grow. Your responses help us tell NBN's story to the publishers, libraries, institutions we partner with. When we can show that our listeners are serious readers, lifelong learners, and heavy library users, it opens doors to new partnerships, better resources, and ultimately a stronger NBN for everyone. And one more thing. If you leave your email address at the end of the survey, you'll be entered to win a $100 gift card to bookshop.org, a chance to stock up on books while supporting independent bookstores at the same time. The survey takes just five minutes. Your answers are confidential and your email will never be shared. Head to newbooksnetwork.com to take the survey today. We really appreciate your support. Now go take the survey.
- [01:45]
C
Welcome to the New Books Network. Hello everybody, and welcome back to New Books Network. I'm Julman Mende, the host of the channel. Today we'll be talking to Dr. Beth Dary Durian about her new book, Art Museum Politics and the Making of the Lourra Abu Dhabi, which was published earlier by Stanford University Press. Thank you so much for joining us at the podcast, Dr. Derridaryan.
- [02:12]
A
Thank you so much for having me. Delighted to be here.
- [02:15]
C
You are currently an assistant professor of Modern Middle East Studies and Anthropology at the Crown center for Model E Studies at Brandes University in the area of Boston. Can you maybe tell us a bit about your general research interests, what you are working on, and how did you come to study like museum institutions in the region?
- [02:39]
A
Yeah, sure. So I'm really interested overall. All my research is really about the ways, the stories that people tell about objects and sites and why they're important. Why so art objects, archeological objects, heritage sites, why some places are important, or some things are important, and some things make it into museums and other things don't. And so I'm interested in the social processes behind art and museums. And I actually came to the book topic. It was actually originally a master's thesis when I was at NYU in the Kevorkian center, and I was doing an MA that was Near Eastern Studies and Museum studies. And so I was very interested in having worked at the Getty Conservation Institute beforehand. I was very interested in the politics of heritage sites in particular. And I had worked in Tunisia for. With the Getty. And so I was also very interested in specifically how this plays out in the Middle east, especially in a time right after the 2003 Iraq war. And in 2006, 2007, the government of the Emirates had announced this massive plan for study at island that included a Louvre museum, a Guggenheim museum, the Zayed National Museum. And also at that time, it was a performing arts center and a maritime museum. And so that seemed like a great topic to do a master's thesis on, which I did. And then I went down the rabbit hole a little bit and wanted to do a PhD and it became my dissertation topic as well.
- [04:17]
C
Thank you so much. And maybe we can start with more basic questions. Why did you want to choose on Abu Dhabi specifically? And what is so special about Abu Dhabi and Louvre, which you research about in your new book?
- [04:36]
A
So one of the major themes in museum studies is about how museums are tools of the state and how they've been used in state building projects. And this really starts with the Louvre in Paris, but after the French Revolution, it becomes sort of like the iconic modern public art museum. The Metropolitan Museum of Art was created in New York City after the US Civil War to help unify the nation. There's a lot of scholarship also on the ways that museums like the Louvre in Paris and the British Museum served their colonial states by justifying colonization and selling it to their home audiences. And so when the Saadiat project was announced in 2006, I was really curious as to how this would work in this context. Again, how do you take something like the Louvre, which is so tied to French history, so tied to really contemporary France and the French state? How does that work in another context? And who is the intended audience? Because the population of the UAE is so diverse. So I don't know that I chose Abu Dhabi so much as that I chose the topic and it happened to be in Abu Dhabi. And ultimately, as the work played out, I ended up incorporating a lot more about you know from Dubai and Sharjah as well. But I think the UAE context, I would argue, is a really good place for us to better understand contemporary museum practice. Particularly because there are these two major trends that we see really coming in the late 20th century and early 21st century. One of them is the increasing role of capital, like capitalization, the increasing role of corporate entities in art and museum practice since the 1980s, and also a push to diversify and decolonize museums. And the UAE is known for being exceptionally wealthy. It's also known for having this very diverse population. And so I think it's a really good place to examine where these two things are coming together again at this point, the nexus of these museum projects
- [06:50]
C
and coming to the title Art Capital. Can you maybe elaborate a bit what you meant by the first part of the titles book? How is it connected between art and the capital? I mean, is it like economic capital or cultural capital? What idea did you hand behind this title?
- [07:12]
A
Yeah, so both. And also making a play on the fact that Abu Dhabi is the capital of the UAE and these museums were intended to be sort of a centerpiece for the uae. So when I realized that I was really doing political economy a lot more than I thought I was in my dissertation, I was really struck by again the. The constant reemergence of this theme of capital, like social capital that comes with art and art making, cultural capital, but also economic capital and the economic capital that's required to undertake a $27 billion museum development project like Saadiat Island. So I wanted to, I came up with the title Art Capital to really. I wanted the title to be a little bit of a pun or a double entendre. And so I liked that it referenced this sort of capitalization as well as the fact that Abu Dhabi is the capital of the Emirates. And the second part of the title was a bit harder. I played with several different options, but ultimately it really is about museum politics and it's about the making of the louv Abu Dhabi, but it's also really about the making of contemporary art worlds more broadly.
- [08:41]
C
And I found it quite interesting that the structure of your book because prior to each chapter you kind of wrote or relooked at exhibitions or part of exhibitions and how did they connect to the chapters that they were following? Why did you choose this kind of structure?
- [09:05]
A
Well, I would say, but Stand on the shoulders of giants. I got the idea from Jessica Winiger's book Creative Reckonings. Jessica was also my advisor, but her structure included these sort of interludes where she was in art spaces. And I thought it was really helpful to put those very immersive episodes where readers could really be like, in the. Feel like they were in the room. And so I thought that would be really helpful, a really helpful structure as well, because in the anthropologists, we anonymize our work and people shared with me we anonymize the names of people, I mean, in our work. And that policy protects our interlocutors because they can tell us things that. And without fear of reprisal. And so some of the data that I have is quite different than, you know, what you might read in the news. And people were able to be a bit more raw and open. But it also means that I can't include pictures of people's artworks. Right. And I can't, because that would undo the anonymization. And so having these interludes before each chapter allowed me to pick some artworks or an instance that was sort of thematically related to the chapter that was to follow to try and put my readers in the room with these artworks and sort of see how I was experiencing them before then diving into the chapters where I can protect people by, you know, by not including by talking about their work and what they shared in interviews, but without revealing their identities.
- [10:55]
C
Thank you so much. And when you researched the work at the Louvre Abu Dhabi and how it operated and were organized, did it tell you something about as well, about the politics behind operating such a museum, how it works, and in comparison, how it was reflected in the country in general?
- [11:23]
A
Yeah. So I think, you know, when the project first started, everything was run through Abu Dhabi's basically department or Ministry of Culture. And so when I first started doing research and first started interviewing folks who worked on the projects, whether, you know, they were assigned to the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi team or the Louv Abu Dhabi team, they all basically had the same boss and the same employer, and they all worked in the same offices because the Louvre had not yet become its own entity, the Guggenheim had not yet become its own entity. And so everything was sort of run through the Department of Culture. And so it was interesting to see, to get a sense of how these distinct brands were sort of being created all under one roof. And of course, as things progressed, these institutions were teased out and have become separate entities in terms of, like, their HR structure, their org structure, those sorts of things. I think what it really reveals about the politics of the country in particular, I think these museums really speak to the aspirations of the Emirates. So I think the Louv Abu Dhabi and The museum projects in general really speak to the aspirations of the country. And by that I mean the UAE has been thinking about ways, the government has been thinking about ways to diversify the economy away from oil. And this is one of the things that they wanted to do. And so part of the structure of the museum projects were these agreements that the Guggenheim or the Louvre would hire a certain number and train a certain number of Emiratis in conservation or in curatorship or things like that. So part of it is about who the Emirates is setting itself up to be in a post oil future, should that ever come to pass. And I also think, you know, one of the arguments that my colleague Alexander Kazerooni makes, he's a French scholar who wrote a book called the Mirror of the Sheiks Le Miroir de Chaykh. And his argument in that book is that the museums in the Gulf region are ultimately about the sheikhs building, the rulers of the Gulf states building relationships. And it's sort of a rapprochement with the west, with Western governments. So there is, I think he is correct in that respect. I think these museums are also attempts to, you know, build jobs for citizens. I think there are attempts to attract tourists to the uae. And I also think that they're about building diplomatic relationships with Western countries.
- [14:06]
C
And can you tell us maybe about some of the content or the exhibitions that were held in the museum? What kind of, what kind of types they were or what did you think were special about them?
- [14:24]
A
So there's a couple that are quite early that I will talk about. So before the actual opening of the Louvre, there's a site called Manarat Saadiyat that was host to Abu Dhabi Art and other exhibitions sort of in the lead up while the buildings were still under construction. And there were a couple of exhibitions in the very beginning that I thought were quite telling. One of them was the History of the World in a Hundred Objects. That was a British museum collaboration and the Birth of a Museum, which was a Louv Abu Dhabi exhibition. And both of those were really attempts to include and put the Emirates into this broader sort of universal art historical timeline, which I thought was very, very interesting. The Guggenheim Abu Dhabi also did an exhibition called Seeing Through Light that focused on light artworks. And one of the other things that I kind of mention and touch on in the book is like the success of light art in the region in general. More recently there's been some really interesting exhibitions on abstraction, and particularly I would argue the Louv Abu Dhabi held one recently. But I think there's, it's really reflective or goes along with a broader movement to understand Arab artists. Contributions to abstraction that has been kind of pioneered by folks like Sultan so' Oud Al Qasimi, who's at the Barjeel Art Foundation. They put together a really phenomenal exhibition called Taking Shape that was about abstraction in the Arab world. And so the Louvre has also done a lot of important work in that area. And there have been some other, you know, interesting exhibitions. There was one a few years ago that included a lot of like illuminated Qurans. And one thing I will say that's maybe a bit outside of your question, but I think one of the other interesting things to look at when we look at how Abu Dhabi has chosen to build museums versus, like, how Doha has chosen to build museums. Abu Dhabi started out and said, we're going to do this massive project. We're going to build all of these museums. And then they have kind of slowly opened one by one over the course of the last 20 years. Whereas Doha started out and said, we're going to open the Museum of Islamic Art. And they did that. And it worked pretty well. And it wasn't a franchise. Right. They did have support from the Burglary Museum, I believe, in consultation, but it was its own entity. It wasn't a franchise or a branch of another museum. And the Museum of Islamic Art did quite well. And then they said, we're going to open Mathaf, the Museum of Arab Art. And so they opened that a couple years later. And then they opened the Qatar National Museum, the renovation. And so Qatar has gone about its museum projects quite differently. And so it was interesting also to see the Louvre Abu Dhabi doing a show that included so many illuminated Qurans, especially because I think Doha has really tried to build an identity for museums that are really customized and feel indigenous and local to the Arab and Muslim context in a way that's not as obvious with the museums in Abu Dhabi.
- [17:47]
C
Thank you so much. And I mean, your research is based partly in anthropology, I think. And you said that you of course interviewed people for your research there as well. What kind of other resources or archives did you use in order to produce your research? And how much did you solely based on interviews and how much did you use for the written archives?
- [18:19]
A
That's a great question. I mean, I think I did 92 interviews total for the work. And anthropology is also often we do a lot of semi structured interviews to sort of encourage people to talk and see where they go. But we also do a lot of observation and So I also attended a lot of exhibitions, art fairs, galleries opening. So if you could think of those as texts, that was also part of the work. I took a lot of pictures of art exhibitions. In terms of written archives, you know, one of the challenges is that there really aren't a lot of institutionalized archives in the region right now, which is a challenge. So the Emirates Fine Arts Society has some archives, and so I did visit those, but people kept telling me that I needed to, especially people in, like, the pioneers generation of artists in the UAE that they call the Gilles Rued. The Gilles Rued artists really felt like you need to go to Kuwait because Kuwait was where everything was happening before the Sharjah Biennial kicked off in 1993. And so I did go to Kuwait. And I'm very indebted to my artist friend Barack Zayd, who connected me with a number of people there, including Khalifa Khattan's family. His wife and daughter run the Mirror House, which includes Lydia Kattan's work as well as Khalifa's work. And they have his personal archive, and they very generously allowed me to access it. And Khalifa had been active since the 1950s. He was one of the first Kuwaiti artists to do exhibitions outside of Kuwait. And he kept brochures from all of these exhibitions. And so there is no other archive that has these things. So it was really incredible. He had flyers from three day exhibitions of Gulf youth artists from 1980. So that was really incredible. And I really appreciate the Kattan family for allowing me access to those archives. I also spoke with Farida Sultan, who runs the Sultan Gallery now out of Kuwait. That gallery opened in 1969. It was Farida's siblings, I believe, that opened it. But she also has a, you know, just an incredible trove of information and history about art practice in the region. And so it was really helpful to consult those. Those archives to get a better sense of the history, because I didn't want it to. One of the things that I really wanted to push back on and to make sure that I have data to push back on was this idea that, like, oh, there's been no art and no museums in this region, in the Gulf region. And what I found was that is absolutely not true. And so I was delighted to be able to include some of these archives to show that.
- [21:33]
C
Thank you so much. And coming maybe to the last two questions of the podcast, I mean, the research took quite a long time. I think somewhere in the beginning of 2009 or 2010 and now 2026. How much did the museum landscape change during that time, would you say? And is it now like an established, more established institution which is respected in the region and maybe in the Western world too? How would you see the developments that took place during the years that you researched the region?
- [22:11]
A
I mean, so my project began in 2009 with this master's thesis and the book. I mean, I defended the dissertation in 2019. I think now, I mean, things have really changed in the uae. And part of where I conclude the book is essentially arguing that in some ways it kind of doesn't matter if the rest of the museums planned for Saadiat ever open, because just the announcement of resources and plans for the museums put all these other things in motion. So there's art Dubai and Abu Dhabi Art. Both of those art fairs started, which there weren't contemporary art fairs in the UAE before that. We have the creation of the Sharjah Art foundation, which basically Sheikhour Al Qasmi started working on the Sharjah biennial in about 2003, I believe. And then she created the Sharjah Art foundation because she wanted there to be something year round to help offer art and bring art to the population of the UAE and not have it just be every other year. And so that, I mean, the Sharjah Arts foundation is now really, really well respected. And Sheikha Hoor is a tremendously important person and has done so much for the art scene. Partly also because she is on the boards of like MoMA, PS1 and another big museum, contemporary art museum in Berlin. I'm blocking, forgetting the name right now. And so she has helped bring a lot of visibility to the uae. There are also places like Elserkal Avenue. The first time that I tried to Visit it in 2013, I couldn't even find it because it was this collection of warehouses in Alcoz in, in Dubai. And there was no signage, there was no parking there was. It. I, I got lost. I gave up trying and I left. You go there now. I went there in January and it is mobbed. You can't find a parking spot. There's like art, you know, contemporary art installations everywhere. The, the whole, the whole place was full each time I visited. And that's also due to a lot of concerted work by the Abdelmonim Al Sakal and his foundation to, to build that area up as a contemporary art district. There are some other galleries that had been in that area for a while, including Courtyard Gallery. But there's really been just a dramatic change. Like you can't, you can't miss it now, but in 2013, I couldn't even find it. So. And I do think that there have been a number of really significant mentorship programs that have started. And this sort of builds on the point about building an infrastructure, an arts infrastructure and an economy and a workforce that's sort of not on oil. Right. But there are now these programs like the Sheikha Salama Emerging Artists Fellowship. Tashkeel for a while had something called the Critical Practice Program. Art Dubai has campus Art Dubai. There are these programs that are designed to support emerging artists and local artists, whether they're UAE citizens or not. And none of that really existed before. And so it's really wonderful to see new generations of artists in the Emirates coming up and having support and being able to make work and to have access to these really stellar senior generations of artists, but also institutions that can help support them and give them broader visibility. And I think to the end part of your question, in some ways I feel like Hanan Toucan's book and mine are almost that we complement each other in terms of topics because she's looking at artists, contemporary art in Lebanon and Jordan and Palestine. One of the things that she notes in her book is that a lot of the artists in these places felt that they needed the recognition of the Gulf art scene, that that was a place where they could, you know, build, they could build a career if they had some exposure in the Gulf. And so I think the Gulf art scene has become a platform for artists within the region, even if they're not necessarily based in the Emirates or the Gulf themselves. And so in that way, I think it's become very important.
- [26:59]
C
Thank you so much, Dr. Deirdrean. And I saw on your personal website, I think, that you're working on two other books or projects. Can you tell us about what they are about or if there are future publications?
- [27:16]
A
Yeah, sure. So I started working on a project during COVID that's very archival because that's what I could do during COVID And the there's a book project that's tentatively titled Arresting Objects, and it follows four sets of objects from the region where these objects were excavated in the Middle east region to their homes in later homes in U.S. museums. And it looks at the politics of transferring ownership. And so things like when does provenance documentation and sort of proof of ownership documentation become important? Because there's a period in the mid 20th century where that happens. Are there things like partage or division of fines, agreements that allow things to move in the early 20th century that again, no longer exist. And what about sort of state seizures of artifacts, like what happened with the US Government seized artifacts that were excavated at Tel Halaf in Syria during World War II? Because the excavator, Max von Oppenheim, was a enemy national. He was a German citizen. So the book is really about the politics of ownership and transfer of ownership of objects. And the cases that I'm looking at are not just the Gulf now, but Jordan, Syria and Yemen. So that's one project. And another project that I'm working on is actually I'm co authoring a graphic novel with an artist that I met doing research on my book project, Azim Al Ghassain. He is the director of the library at Jamil Art center in Dubai. And the College of Worcester, where I used to teach for five years, sponsored an excavation to Jordan in 1967. And based on those archives and working with the collection at Worcester, we're telling a story about how knowledge is made in archaeology and the politics of knowledge making in archaeology. And so we're incorporating a lot of the original documents from and from an archival material from the dig and incorporating it into a fictionalized story based on one of the students who excavated at the dig and his relationship with the locals at the site. So that's been a lot of fun to think about telling stories visually instead of in the more academic mode that I'm much more comfortable with. So it's been really fun to work with.
- [29:52]
C
Azim, thank you so much, Dr. Derdavian, for your time today, and it was an honor and pleasure to talk with you about your new book, Art Capital, which is published now by Stanford University. Peret, thank you so much for being here today with us.
- [30:06]
A
Thank you. Togru.