Editorial musings from the nest
The quote: Imperfect action beats perfect inaction every time | Harry Truman …
Back in the box As US diplomats, schoolchildren, business executives and Artistic Directors trickle back into the region after the summer, we’re back too – with a new look that matches our renewed eagerness to serve information, comment and the odd joke to the UAE’s creative community. Let us know if you approve of the revamp (and next week the website will finally be getting a major overhaul too. There were things in the attic that we’d completely forgotten about …)
Flying visits On the subject of arrivals, DXB handled 31.5m passengers in the first half of the year – down by 31% against 2025. Emirates says it’s doing 90% of its normal schedule, but Lufthansa, British Airways, and Singapore Airlines have all extended route suspensions in the region. AUH, which probably relies less on tourists and stopovers, is more or less back to normal.
Back to work And on the subject of Artistic Directors and arrivals, we buttonholed Bill Bragin of The Arts Center at NYUAD just after his return from his travels to talk about the new season he’s programmed, where the thematic links come from, and how many Edinburgh shows is too many to do in one day. As always, it was an interesting and entertaining chat; read all about it here.
Read on While you’re visiting the website for Bill’s views, check out a couple of features we added recently. Frieze Abu Dhabi published a list of the galleries it has signed up for November; we took a look, counted fewer than were at the last Abu Dhabi Art, and concluded that this didn’t mean very much – Frieze is going to be good. And AI video slop is already filling the small screen; what can be done to clarify the what, where and how of AI in Hollywood? And more important, who owns the rights?
Playtime There’s a new drama competition for schools – it’s a version of Short+Sweet, meaning school groups do a 10-minute play (doesn’t have to be original, could be an extract). This first UAE competition is for students aged 14–18 (next year will also cover Junior Schools); entries close at the end of September, with the festival taking place on weekends in November. Email queries to Festival Director Lucinda Brown, who can also point you at the entry form.
Snap Sharjah Museums is again running its photography competition for schoolkids under the ‘I Am at Sharjah Museums’ banner. Cycle 2 and 3 students from public and private schools have until 25 October to submit original photographs as 300dpi JPGs on this year’s theme, Traditional Emirati Ornaments, taken in any of SMA’s museums – could be decorative elements from traditional architecture, clothing and textiles, furniture, household objects and/or traditional crafts. Each of 20 winners will get AED 500 plus an exhibition in January. More here, including how-to-enter info.
D is for dirham The UAE’s dirham currency symbol wasn’t ready for the last Unicode Standard release. Looks like it will be encoded in September 2026, when the D-with-two-bars will replace the carat symbol above the 6 key. Until then: AED it is.
What the rich want Anny Shaw in The Art Newspaper has previewed an upcoming report that confirms the imbalance in the art market. In 2025, 0.3% of all works sent to auction (1,761 of art them) generated 45% of all global auction sales by value; in the first half of 2026, just 150 works have been responsible for 60% of global auction sales. Prof Rachel Pownall has developed a theoretical model that shows how changing wealth inequality amplifies art price movements; so “income inequality is not merely reinforcing the art market’s ‘winner takes all’ dynamic but is actively driving it – and, in doing so, creating a more fragile cultural ecosystem that has become too dependent on the ultra-rich”. Pownall argues that measuring the value of the arts by prices, attendance figures or financial returns, downplays any broader cultural and social contribution. Which is well understood, but it’s good to have some academic rigour applied to the argument.
Job share Hoor Al Qasimi has added the chairpersonship (or presidency: WAM and her PR agency seem to disagree here) of Sharjah Museums Authority to the many jobs she already has – including heading the Sharjah Architecture Triennial, The Africa Institute, Global Studies University and the University of the Arts Sharjah as well as last year’s Aichi Triennale and the 2026 Biennale of Sydney plus (of course) her main role as head of Sharjah Arts Foundation and the Sharjah Biennial …
Theatre awards Last year’s inaugural DXB Theatre Awards have morphed into the UAE Theatre Awards to reflect “what we’ve seen firsthand over the past year: a theatre community that is growing, evolving, collaborating, and making an increasingly meaningful impact across the UAE”. For 2026 there are 30+ categories for individuals, productions, venues, creative and technical contributions, and more; nominations are now open and close 31 October. We’re assured there will no limitations on who can apply, so if you’ve been involved in theatre of any kind anywhere in the UAE (including schools and improv) check out the website for more info.
Brushed off Dyson’s latest application of too much tech to an everyday object is a wifi-connected toothbrush. A built-in 100K-pixel camera beneath the brush head analyses 28 images per second; AI detects gaps and triggers a flossing jet spray. Training it on 470K dental images reportedly took six years. For this you’ll pay $499, but you can livestream your brushing to an app on your phone where your technique can be checked out. Not sure what else to add, except that (a) you’ll need a low-foaming toothpaste which Dyson also sells; (b) ‘CameraJet’ seems a rather naff name; and (c) it’s surprisingly ugly.
AI needs AI police Talking of AI, the key takeaway from the Hugging Face–OpenAI attack was that around 1,200 agents meant to be isolated from one another found a way to communicate with one another – sending more than 70,000 messages and files between themselves. They knew they were breaking the rules, worked together in an organised hierarchy to do so, and figured out a method that let them hide their activities from humans. Axios has a pretty good plain-English summary of what happened, and it’s all pretty alarming. Perhaps most worrying is the admission by researchers working on the post-mortem that it was too huge and complex for them to understand without using AI agents of their own.
Art edit So you think most gallery reviews and other art write-ups are pretty poor? Welcome to a new start-up called Artlance which enables galleries (and other art organisations) to commission critics to write about shows and publish on their own platforms. Jonathan Neil, who set up Artlance, has a good summary of why it’s such a good idea. It’s simple and clean: the commissioner posts details of a project, a writer selects it (commissioners don’t choose the writer, but all writers are vetted by Artlance), does the work (there’s a standard two-week timeline from commission to publication via the writer’s own websites, substacks, newsletters etc – see examples here), and gets paid at a flat $1 per word. The commissioner pays the wordage plus a platform fee of 15 or 20%, depending on length. There’s no guarantee how many people will actually see the article – most critics and writers with a substack would be happy to have more than a few hundred subscribers – but the commissioner would be able to reference or perhaps reproduce it in their own materials. There’s currently a US bias, but that doesn’t seem to be baked in. From a writer’s point of view, $1 per word is a fair to middling rate, always provided there isn’t a mass of research required – $1 per word is attractive if the job takes five hours, much less so if it takes 20.
Petrocelli’s departure Farewell to Paolo Petrocelli, who after four years has left his job as Head of Dubai Opera – “I have concluded my chapter with Dubai Opera with a profound sense of gratitude and pride, as I look ahead to the next stage of my international career”. His Dubai tenure focused on broadening the venue’s identity further (though it was never limited to opera, of course) and putting more bums on seats (the 2023–24 season reportedly attracted about 250,000 attendees, the venue’s highest figure at that point). Perhaps most important, Petrocelli gave the venue a solid cultural narrative: an international, cosmopolitan performing-arts venue that reflecting Dubai’s multinational population. He could also be credited with raising Dubai Opera’s association with cultural diplomacy, international institutions, and high-profile corporate and diplomatic audiences; his highly active and much-garlanded personal profile would have helped, too. As yet there’s no word on a successor; it will be interesting to see if the next Head of Dubai Opera will be more of a cultural ambassador or a commercial manager …
The future is closed (temporarily) The Museum of the Future has closed its exhibitions to visitors “as we prepare for our next chapter”. An open call for suggestions and comments a couple of months ago said “The next phase of the museum’s programming will focus on more interactive experiences exploring scientific and technological developments expected to influence economies, societies and everyday life in the coming decades”, which doesn’t exactly give too many clues; but a major overhaul of its exhibitions should leave room for a Dataland-style art-ish approach … The museum is expected to be back in late February, the fifth anniversary of its original opening.
Useful app of the week Copynpaste.xyz is a free site for pasting text from one app into another while preserving and translating the formatting you copied. If you’re copying from a Google Doc into Mailchimp, for instance, it will automatically handle bold, italics, and links in a way that Mailchimp recognises. Smart, handy and free. Try it here.
Something for the weekend With Chronoodle you have to put the dates in order, but in a slightly different way to all the other ‘put the dates in order’ games. Play the archive; Simple fun and a pleasing addition to your morning routine. Try it here.
Things we didn’t know no.94 Scientific proof isn’t a thing – proof is incompatible with science which is, by its nature, provisional and self-correcting. Only maths has proofs.
Earworm of the week Erykah Badu & The Alchemist : Witch Doctor
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