A trip to three headline exhibitions in Doha suggests a culture pulled between global and local priorities.
Qatar Museums Authority
Posted inOpinion
Art Center’s Closure Bodes Ill for Qatar
With the Qatar Museums Authority’s focus on the international stage and the general public’s lack of interest, who will support the artists in Qatar who have not yet — and likely never will — achieve such fame? That is a question that is difficult to answer without the Katara Art Center.
Posted inArt
What Does It Mean to Be a Cultural Disrupter?
Coverage of the visual arts in the New York Times hit a new low last weekend in its Arts & Leisure feature, “The Disrupters,” a roundup of interviews with “people who broke the rules” during 2013, “a year of cultural upheaval.”
Posted inArt
Moral Distortions: Versailles, Qatar, and Kings
With inadvertent timeliness, a retrospective of the world’s richest artist opened in one of the world’s richest cities in the middle of the run of Robert Polidori’s elegiac photography exhibition, Versailles.
Posted inOpinion
The Perils of Public Sculpture in Qatar
Statues: like many things that exist in the world, people sometimes have idiotic opinions about them. Mute and immobile, they are the helpless victims of sad little moralists of all stripes, from Kansas to Qatar.
Posted inArt
Live Tweeting the Arts
LOS ANGELES — If some reject the idea that culture can be engaged with through your smartphone, others are finding ways to do exactly that, particularly using Twitter.
