It was a long 15-hour flight to Doha, Qatar, to see Japanese artist Takashi Murakami’s latest mega show. Why would I bother flying all the way around the world to see paintings I’ve mostly seen already? Perhaps because, according to the BBC, Qatar has quietly invested over $1.25 billion in art over the past five years—in fact, I’d bet it’s double that—and also because they are part of what’s keeping this crazy art market buoyant. And what about the facts that Qatar reportedly bought a painting (not mine!) from Cezanne’s “Card Players” series for $250 million, and is rumored to be the buyer of auction cover lots from Rothkos to Lichtensteins, Warhols and beyond? I also wanted to visit my favorite Murakami painting, Tan Tan Bo Puking, a.k.a. Gero Tan, and see how it compared to his newest one, a 300-foot long masterwork dubbed Arhat.
I’ve been a Murakami devotee for over a decade, starting just before his breakthrough, the Fondation Cartier show back in ’02, and I’ve seen and studied most shows he’s done, from his biannual “Geisai” art fairs to the fascinating “Little Boy” exhibition at the Japan Society in 2005, right through the Brooklyn/LACMA retrospective of 2008 and up to the recent “Homage to Yves Klein” paintings at Paris’s Galerie Perrotin.
But none of this could explain to me why the 29-year-old Sheikha Al-Mayassa bint Hamad bin Khalifa Al-Thani had chosen him to do this mega show in Qatar, appropriately titled “Ego.” The Sheikha, 14th child of Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al-Thani, the Emir of Qatar, is a powerful woman in her country, which isn’t an easy thing to be in a traditional Muslim society. She serves as the chair of the Qatari National Foundation of Museums and the Council of Trustees of Qatar Museums Authority, a board that includes one New Yorker, MoMA board president Marie-Josée Kravis. As chairwoman of the QMA she has a powerful role in a country where a new and beautiful I.M Pei-designed Museum of Islamic Art has just been completed and the all-new National Museum of Qatar by Jean Nouvel is slated to open in 2014. But still I was wondering, why would Qatar and its powerful Sheikha choose Mr. Murakami as the artist to launch their ambitious contemporary program?
As strange as the idea of serving sushi in the Qatari desert may sound, that’s what the show felt like to me. Qatar has the money and the will to become the destination for the preservation of some top-tier Islamic and global culture. It is a small country, but one with grand visions; a country with a minuscule citizen population of about 300,000 people where it is estimated that the valuable oil and gas reserves will last another 75 years. Divide that by the population and one can comfortably speculate that each citizen is theoretically worth hundreds of millions of dollars. This is also an extremely young state, a British protectorate as recently as 1971. Given all of this, is it any surprise it has been on a global shopping spree, spending its money on banks, real estate, soccer teams and a little art for fun and for show?
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