The Art Angle Podcast: What Is Saudi Arabia Trying to Do With Contemporary Art?

by admin

Feb 18, 2020

artnet

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Some 16 months after the brutal murder of Washington
Post journalist and Saudi dissident
Jamal Khashoggi at the hands of state agents, the
organization behind the namesake Southern California biennial
Desert X announced that it would put on an ambitious new exhibition
of contemporary art in AlUla, a UNESCO World Heritage Site deep
in the Medina region of Saudi Arabia. Word of the show (which
debuted this February) incited a firestorm of criticism from
international art-world figures, including three of Desert X’s own
advisors—artist Ed Ruscha, art historian and curator Yael
Lipschutz, and philanthropist Tristan Milanovich—all of whom
resigned in protest.

Mohammad Bin Salman, the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, has
simultaneously denied ordering Khashoggi’s slaying
and publicly taken
responsibility for it because the act “happened on [his] watch.” The dissonance between those concepts parallels the
dissonance playing out on a national level under his rule.

On one hand, MBS (as Bin Salman is popularly known) has launched
major social reforms, including curtailing the authority of the
religious police and permitting women to drive, as well as
continuing to pump vast government resources into new cultural
initiatives such as Desert X AlUla—all with the aim of diversifying
the oil-dependent Saudi economy and improving the country’s dubious
reputation with more progressive world leaders. On the other hand,
MBS has also made several troubling moves to consolidate power in
recent years, including arresting prominent opposition
clerics and imprisoning more than 200
businessman, princes, and other officials in Riyadh’s Ritz-Carlton
hotel for weeks under the guise of an anti-corruption
crackdown.

So how exactly does Desert X in particular, and art in general,
fit into this high-stakes geopolitical puzzle? Is the burgeoning
Saudi contemporary art scene little more than a propaganda weapon
wielded by MBS? Can the kingdom’s homegrown artists and projects
ever be evaluated on their creative merits once they accept funding
or other support from the crown? And if so, where can those lines
be drawn?

On this week’s episode of the Art Angle, journalist Rebecca Anne
Proctor called in just days after returning from her visit to
Desert X AlUla to discuss the controversial show, the backlash it
inspired, and what Western critics could learn from speaking with the artists involved
themselves.

Listen below and subscribe to the Art Angle on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, SoundCloud, or wherever you get your podcasts. (Or
catch up on past
episodes here on Artnet News.)