This week’s editorial musings
from magpie’s nest
The quote: Playful doesn’t mean trivial any more than solemn means serious Stephen Sondheim …
Louvre legacy Manuel Rabaté is leaving Louvre Abu Dhabi, where since 2016 he has been its first and so far only director. He’s moving to New Delhi to become CEO of India’s leading private art museum, the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art. KNMA is preparing to expand significantly its footprint and scope, moving to a new 100,000m2 complex designed by David Adjaye Associates that will have several exhibition, performance and theatre spaces, a library, an archive and an education centre. Rabaté was instrumental in the development of the Louvre AD as head of Agence France-Muséums, a consultancy set up specifically for the purpose; apart from the ‘world museum’ philosophy, his long-term legacy may well be the development of curatorial and art conservation teams, both thin on the ground when he arrived.
Rabaté said KNMA is not only shaping the story of Indian and South Asian art today “but is also defining what a 21st-century museum can be”, which was kinda the remit of Louvre AD too … He leaves the Louvre in rude health, with last year’s record 1.4m visitors including 84% from overseas (which meets DCT’s requirement for positioning the emirate as a hub for cultural tourism).
Rabaté will officially step down from the Louvre Abu Dhabi on 7 March, apparently with everyone’s best wishes – the museum extends its gratitude to Manuel Rabaté for his extraordinary contribution and wishes him every success in his new role”. We’ll second that …
Deadline 1 X Fest Theatre Festival, the Junction’s riposte to Short ’n’ Sweet, is running auditions this weekend (7 & 8 Feb, 10am-1pm) for actors and directors. Sign up here …
Deadline 2 Applications are open for Art Dubai’s Gallery Assistant programme – work behind the scenes to support exhibitors and greet visitors, “learning about modern and contemporary art and the fair’s operations”. Applicants must have some art-related experience and be over 21 years old. The show runs 15-19 April, including previews; assistants gets AED 200 per day (and you have to be available for all event days, plus two unpaid training days). Apply here before 15 Feb …
Deadline 3 MERIP (the well-respected US-based Middle East Research and Information Project) is seeking pitches for a Summer 2026 publication exploring visual art and cultural production in the Middle East and North Africa – “pieces that dig beneath the surface of cultural production to ask questions about its material conditions, its circulation and the political possibilities it enables or expresses”. There may be “a modest discretionary fee”. More info is here; if you’re interested, send a brief description and short bio to cfp@merip.org before 23 Feb …
Duty calls DCT Abu Dhabi has launched what it calls a pioneering customs duty waiver programme that will position the emirate as “one of the world’s most trusted and forward-looking destinations for the long-term placement, conservation, and exhibition of high-value artworks”. There are many hoops to jump through to ensure “due diligence, documented provenance, ownership transparency, and alignment with applicable legal and compliance standards”, but cutting import taxes should makes it cheaper for collectors, investors and institutions to buy art and bring it into the country. Seems Abu Dhabi wants to build a reputation as a home for high-value art (and for high-net-worth art buyers) …
Openings Three new exhibitions we’d like to see: Huma Shoaib‘s search for geometries in life, Abdelwahab Hawam‘s female-dominated landscapes, Jorge Tacla‘s negatives at Sharjah Art Foundation (and while we’re there we’ll catch the other SAF show, Ahaad Alamoudi) …
That Dubai traffic The latest idea to ease travel times in Dubai is the Dubai Loop, an underground mass-transit system using Tesla cabs travelling along dedicated tunnels. RTA has done a deal with Musk’s Boring Company, which is doing a similar network in Las Vegas. Construction is due to start later this year with a 6.4km pilot route that has four stations between DIFC and Dubai Mall; that should be ready in a year. The full project will be 22km and link the financial district with Business Bay. Not sure how much of an impact it will have – is DIFC to Business Bay really the bottleneck? – but the pilot is expected to handle 13,000 passengers per day and the full route should be good for around 30,000 …
Tonight’s the night Huang Yi, last seen here dancing with an industrial robot, collaborates with AV pioneer Ryoichi Kurokawa to dance the lines from a hundred artworks by the classic Chinese calligrapher Tong Yang-Tze at NYUAD Arts Center …
Spotting the big bucks We weren’t too complimentary about Spotify last week, on the grounds that the streaming platform underpays artists. In the interests of balance, Spotify just said it paid more than $11bn in royalties last year, half of that going to independent artists and labels …
Useful app of the week Tock is a minimal, simple macOS menu bar timer – one active timer at a time, controlled by keyboard with simple natural-language input (like ‘45m’ or ‘coffee 5 mins’). Open source and free. More here …
Something for the weekend A nice variant on a road racing game: instead of being a driver, you are the road (sort of). Try it here …
Things we didn’t know no.94 A third of the world has an Apple device (maybe). Apple’s latest earnings report says the company now has an installed base of more than 2.5bn active devices; the world’s population is currently estimated to be around 8.3bn, so we did the maths. Ok, so many Apple users have more than one Apple device, but it’s still an impressive number …
Earworm of the week Yeule : Evangelic Girl is a Gun
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