(The rest of the nine artists in the show are Middle Eastern or based in the United States or Europe.) Still, Desert X leaders spoke proudly of the efforts they had made to include local residents, like holding art workshops for Saudi women or making entrance to the exhibition free. Though the setting is new, the five Saudi artists in the exhibition have arguably already crossed boundaries and bridges like many other Saudi artists, they have lived, studied or exhibited in Europe or the United States. The Los Angeles Times’s art critic, Christopher Knight, scathed the “morally corrupt” collaboration as “merely putting lipstick on a pig.”īut Manal AlDowayan, a Dubai artist whose installation “Now You See Me, Now You Don’t” stood not far away, brushed off the high-flown press-conference chatter. Three of Desert X’s board members, including the prominent artist Ed Ruscha, resigned in protest. These were the fruits of Desert X AlUla, a partnership between Desert X, a California-based art biennial that had staged two previous exhibitions in the Coachella Valley, and the Saudi government, which had coaxed Desert X to mount a show in its own western desert at the country’s expense.Ĭontroversy ensued, as it tends to when Saudi Arabia - whose government has hacked the iPhone of one of the world’s richest men, tortured dissidents, dismembered a critical journalist and helped ignite a humanitarian disaster in Yemen - overlaps with Western institutions. Across the gold-and-russet sandstone canyon, the brawny rock formations sprouted contemporary art: an iridescent spaceshiplike sculpture, a glinting metal tunnel, a scattering of brightly painted spheres. At a buffet ornamented with cantaloupes carved in the shape of flowers, waiters tended a fresh-squeezed juice station and rows of dainty canapés. AL ULA, Saudi Arabia - The Coachella art crowd had arrived in the Saudi desert, and chic caftans in head-turning colors outnumbered abayas on the sand.
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