Editorial musings from the nest
The quote: Success is not the key to happiness. Happiness is the key to success Albert Schweitzer …
Buy now Tickets to Guggenheim Abu Dhabi are now on sale – standard AED 70, free for under 18s, students and seniors. Tickets are specific to a booked day (so could be the 11 Dec opening) and mercifully aren’t timed.
And Sharjah Art Foundation is doing a AED 40 Early Bird Pass offer for the ninth edition of Sharjah Film Platform, its annual festival of independent cinema and experimental filmmaking – nearly 30 screenings between 30 Oct and 8 Nov. The Pass covers access to all films plus festival merch and a AED 500 voucher to be used at SAF Shops (provided you see at least seven films at the festival). Find them here.
Christie’s confidence Christie’s first live auction of fine art in Abu Dhabi, labelled MAWASIM: 20 Years of Modern and Contemporary Middle Eastern Art, takes place on 1 Nov, a few days before the rush of Saadiyat events around Frieze Abu Dhabi and the Guggenheim opening. It’s no token event, with more than 70 works from six decades of museum-quality art at spiffy Art Dubai Edition hotel on Bateen Marina (two days of viewing are available to all, so you can treat it as a rather special gallery show). Top seller is expected to be a late-50s Paul Guiragossian wedding scene, sale estimate $300,000-500,000.
Photo booths Vantage Point Editions offers an opportunity to see and buy work from from 20 UAE-based photographers in a three-day popup this weekend at Sharjah Art Foundation’s Photography Gallery. The name riffs off Vantage Point, SAF’s biennial photography exhibition, but it’s nothing to do with the open-call show. Worth supporting local photographers, though we have no idea of the prices …
Dezeen’s design The regional shortlists for the Dezeen Design Awards are out, with 50 contenders in each of the three areas (EMEA, APAC, Americas). The awards range widely, from furniture to architecture; but there are a lot of interiors, which accounts for most of the eight nominations from the Gulf – two each in Doha, Kuwait and Dubai, one for Sharjah and one for Iran. The Dubai nominees are both interiors, LW Design for the 1930s Shanghai style of Yu & Mi Restaurant & Bar at the Mandarin Oriental Downtown Dubai and Verhaal for the Japanese restaurant Kumo on Al Wasl Road. Sharjah’s is the minimalistic Abaya Pavilion outside the House of Wisdom by LYYH Studio. We’re a bit surprised that the UAE couldn’t come up with some cooler options that fit the “beautiful, innovative, beneficial” criteria, but it is a self-nominated entry-fee competition.
Book marks Winners of the 20th Sheikh Zayed Book Award were announced at last week’s Abu Dhabi International Book Fair – Ashraf Al Elashmawy (Egypt) in the Literature category; Mustapha Rajouane (Morocco) as Young Author; Iraqi-American researcher Nawal Nasrallah for Translation category; Zuhair Tawfiq (Jordan) for Literary and Art Criticism; German scholar and translator Stefan Weidner in the Arab Culture in Other Languages category; Prof Dr Mohamed Elkhosht (Egypt) for the Manuscripts, Encyclopaedias, and Lexicons; and Emirates Literature Foundation for Publishing and Cultural Technology. More here.
Ig wins Winners of the 2026 Ig Nobel awards – for achievements that “first make people laugh and then make them think” – were given “24/7” lectures to talk about their work in 24 seconds and then in seven words. Winning research: whether the privileged are more prone to behaving badly (they are), a much-needed scientific definition of kissing, the best angle for splashless use of urinals (-30 deg), how much we want our friends to hate our enemies (a lot), and which parts of venomous snakes are most likely to trigger a bite when you step on them (it’s the head). Full details here.
Bayeux blues So you couldn’t bag a ticket to see the Bayeux Tapestry in London? This excellent hour-long video explainer might help fill the gap (and will certainly make you more knowledgable than the average Tapestry visitor).
Get heard Vinyl Souk has already produced two (very different) Made In the Emirates albums, and now it’s looking for content for a third – “ambient electronic, beats, boom bap, left field hip hop, rap, spoken word, experimental electronica, sound design and music that challenges easy categorisations …” Submissions close 30 Nov 30; here’s the form.
How to be a green artist Back in July a UK artists’ membership organisation launched a Green Manifesto for Artists. It’s not a manifesto in fact, more a practical guide to suggest environmentally responsible practices for artists. We dissected the document; it’s a bit lightweight and sometimes impractical, but the principles are good and much of the checklist is sound. We plugged in our own notes about making an energy-light website, too. Read it here.
Animated opp Dubai Culture’s Stories of Wulfa is a big-money competition for an original animated series “inspired by Emirati culture and values”. The winning project gets AED 2m to spend on developing and producing a series of 15 episodes each around 20 mins. Apply before 15 Nov with episode synopses, a complete script for the first episode, and proof of your animation skills. More here.
Making money in Qatar MCH Group, parent of Art Basel, had a good half-year – operating revenue up 12% to CHF 249m over the same period last year, profits quadrupling to top CHF 18m. Art Basel fairs aren’t listed separately, but MCH said the revenue increase at least was mainly to the first edition of Art Basel Qatar plus two construction-industry fairs.
Free laughs Laughter Factory has three pairs of tickets to give away for any of its October shows: just nominate your all-time favourite Laughter Factory comedian here.
Dealing with documenta Last year’s documenta – perhaps Europe’s most interesting non-commercial art fair – was riven with divisions over Gaza and Israel, with an immense cloud of bad feeling all round. Naomi Beckwith, curator of the next one (documenta 16) talked to Die Zeit on taking a difficult job: “This is about a mission that reaches far beyond whatever is happening geopolitically at this particular moment. That’s why I became a curator and studied art history in the first place: because I’m interested in the broad horizon … Far more important than my personal stance is the question of how we can overcome this divisive mindset. How can we start talking to one another again?”
Billionaire blues Seems the superrich are getting superricher and leaving the slightly less superrich way behind. Forbes’s annual list of the 400 wealthiest Americans reports that the top 20 are richer than the next 380 combined (and another 590 billionaires simply aren’t rich enough to make the list at all).
Elfin auditions The Elf in the Gulf folk are looking for performers for this year’s “musical theatre experience for all ages” – auditions for solo, duet, trio singing and dancing plus named and ensemble performance roles (ages 9 to adult) run 2-5pm on 27 Sept at Aquila School in Dubai. Sign up here.
Guggenheim gets started Guggenheim Abu Dhabi is prepping for its 11 Dec opening with a series of events this weekend “for the public to engage with artists, ideas and conversations that are shaping the new museum”. Network of Answers (to 22 Oct) is an interactive work by Guggenheim Abu Dhabi-commissioned artist Agatha Gothe-Snape: passers-by respond to a series of questions at a phone booth installation, intended to gather personal reflections, memories and perspectives to build a collective archive of voices from Abu Dhabi. The weekend sees talks, workshops and a quiz about the Egyptian Guggenheim Abu Dhabi Collection artist Chant Avedissian; we don’t know timings, but you can register here. And at 6pm on 29 Sept artist Rachid Koraïchi talks with curator Abdelkader Damani about abstraction as a shared artistic language across cultures and time; register here – but be warned: the PR bumf gave Louvre Abu Dhabi as the location (which makes sense) but the registration form says Sheikh Zayed Grand Mosque (which doesn’t). Good luck …
Useful app of the week You don’t have to get all the team into the same photo booth to do the team portrait – Aaavatar is a Mac app that will remove and replace backgrounds (choose a preset, match your brand colour, or upload your own) and also has retouching to auto-align faces etc. Free for three images with a small watermark, or €4.99+VAT per month for the unlimited version. Check it out here.
Something for the weekend Mystery Chart shows you five charts per day, all built from public datasets (eg WHO and OECD) but with the title redacted. You just have to guess what the data represents. Surprisingly addictive. Try it here.
Things we didn’t know no.94 Assuming a lifespan of 80 years, the entire span of human civilisation is only about 70 people old. The US Civil War was two people ago, the Ottomans sacked Constantinople seven people ago, Julius Caesar was murdered 26 people ago.
Earworm of the week Horsegirl : Julie
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