Art Basel Qatar's deep lore is here
Digging up forgotten precedents and pinpointing unprecedented ambitions
A view of Doha’s skyline in 2023. Photo: Zairon, courtesy of Wiki via Creative Commons license
Art Basel shocked the art world by announcing on Tuesday morning (May 20) that it will launch its fifth annual fair in Doha, the capital of Qatar, in early February 2026. While people in the trade are still in the midst of analyzing the team-up—a process I already tried to assist via this in-depth explainer for the Business of Fashion—I wanted to dredge up three overlooked but noteworthy nuggets from the depths, for your eyes and enrichment only…1
1. This isn’t actually the first event Art Basel has planned in the Gulf.
One forgotten slice of art industry history makes Art Basel’s pact with the Qataris a little less surprising. That would be Art Basel Inside, which was meant to be a three-day event on art, science, and technology staged in Abu Dhabi in February 2020. Tickets for the experience, which was announced in September 2019, were reportedly priced at $15,000 a pop excluding airfare (though they did include “luxury accommodations and curated culinary experiences,” an Art Basel spokesperson said at the time).
I’d love to explain to you what, exactly, Art Basel Inside was supposed to be, but the signals were tough to decipher. A statement from the company said the event would feature “thematic journeys, site-specific installations, and commissioned performances,” as well as “dynamic dialogues and workshops with visionary guest speakers from the worlds of technology and science, addressing topics such as intelligence, environments, sustainability, and the role of the arts.”
Marc-Olivier Wahler, the curator tapped to lead the initiative, told ARTnews that it was “not in an art fair, not in a museum, and also not really a summit.” Instead, he called Art Basel Inside “an immersive environment, a unique ecosystem in which critical issues such as sustainability and artificial intelligence are not approached as isolated topics, but instead as contingencies within a larger network.” Which, I mean… OK!
What matters in the end is that Art Basel Inside never made it out of the incubator. The company cancelled the event less than two months after announcing it, saying that the timeline to produce it had proven overambitious. (Speculation within the industry was that tickets had not sold at a sufficient clip to justify moving forward.)
Now the brand has announced its return to the Gulf with a more clearly defined business proposition. But the memory of Art Basel Inside clarifies that the company’s programmatic interest in the region goes back at least six years or so.
2. This isn’t Qatar’s first alliance with a Western art fair, either.
Also largely lost to history alongside Art Basel Inside is Doha’s dalliance with Design Miami/, whose fairs blending high-end design objects and art have usually opened in concert with Art Basel’s fairs in Miami Beach, Basel, and more recently, Paris.2
As a workaround during the supreme weirdness of the US’s only pre-vaccine winter of Covid, Design Miami/ inaugurated a series of pop-up selling exhibitions called Podium with an event in Miami’s Moore Building in December 2020. The company broadcast the following June that a Podium show would go on in Shanghai that November. Then in September 2021, we learned the brand would stage another Podium event in Doha in the spring of 2022.
Except I haven’t been able to find any evidence the Qatari event actually happened. Even more curiously, I haven’t been able to dig up any official confirmation that it was ever canceled, either. Design Miami/’s partnership with Doha seems to have just faded into the ether, even as the Shanghai edition went ahead—albeit after a two-year delay. Maybe La’eeb, Qatar’s mascot from the 2022 World Cup, spirited the fair into the “parallel mascot-verse that is indescribable”? (I reached out to a Design Miami/ spokesperson about all this but didn’t hear back before newsletter time.)
To be clear, I’m not suggesting the fate of Design Miami/ in Doha stems from anything scandalous or even modestly ominous vis-à-vis Art Basel Qatar. They are different companies organizing different events that have a different focus, with almost four years’ worth of distance separating the announcements about their respective collaborations with the country.
But again, we (or at least, I) probably should have watched Qatar closer than we (or at least, I) did when it came to high-end art fairs based on the very serious interest the country had already expressed in the sector via Design Miami/.
3. The growth Art Basel is aiming for in Qatar would be unprecedented.
Although the joint press release from Art Basel and its Qatari partners never names a specific number of exhibitors for the first edition of the new fair, Art Basel chief exec Noah Horowitz told Puck that the maiden voyage would consist of “roughly 50 galleries.” Kate Brown at Artnet News reported on Tuesday (after talking with Vincenzo de Bellis, Art Basel’s director of fairs and exhibition platforms) that the ultimate goal would be for Art Basel Qatar to expand to a similar size as Art Basel Paris—which was, until two days ago, the brand’s smallest event at around 200 exhibitors.
You don’t need to be J. Robert Oppenheimer at the chalkboard to deduce this means the goal is to roughly quadruple the size of Art Basel Qatar over time.3
Here’s the thing: Art Basel has never quadrupled the size of one of its fairs—ever. The closest it’s gotten was with its flagship fair in Switzerland, and even that comp isn’t all that close to what the company seems to be shooting for now.
The very first edition of Art Basel, staged in 1970, hosted 90 galleries and 20 publishers for a grand total of 110 exhibitors. For the past several years, the contemporary version of the fair has comprised around 300 exhibitors. Even if you exclude the publishers and focus on just the actual galleries that exhibited at the 1970 fair, then, it would still only mean the fair has expanded a little more than 3X in 50 years.
Which means the plan at this point is to upstage that growth rate in Qatar by around 33%.
Art Basel and its partners in Doha could very well pull it off with the help of interested dealers ranging from the Middle East and North Africa to South and Southeast Asia. But we should be clear that this isn’t just a typical plan to step up the size of a fair, or even to strengthen a pre-existing market; it’s the art-trade equivalent of a nation-building project. And this little spelunking trip into history has convinced me that the campaign is going to be even more fascinating to watch than I thought.
For those who don’t have a BOF subscription, I reposted the whole thing on my Insta ; )
Yes, the forward slash is part of the official branding for Design Miami/, not a typo. For the overstimulated copyeditor that rules part of my brain, it is the most exasperating use of punctuation in the industry since the demise of Art Agency, Partners.
A fun fact I learned from hate-reading most of American Prometheus, the Oppenheimer biography that Christopher Nolan turned into a sycophantically overrated biopic with one good sequence and a lifetime’s worth of inert-at-best scenes of characters talking to each other in rooms: Oppenheimer kind of sucked at math. He was one of the all-time great ideas guys, and eventually became a phenomenal manager and coach of talent, but he regularly needed someone else to execute the calculations that would prove out his theories (which, most of the time, were right!).