DESERT FANTASIES - Overbooked: The Exploding Business of Travel and Tourism - page 138

After a two-hour drive we arrived in Abu Dhabi, the capital city of the UAE, built on a
series of islands. We crossed the bridge and headed toward the famed Corniche, a wide
promenade along the beach with wide spaces for walking, jogging and cycling framed by
palm trees that define the passage and catch breezes off the gulf. Driving down the Cor-
niche, with trees and green spaces, the inevitable sight of towering skyscrapers seems less
overwhelming.
This is the emirate that is making its name as the cultural alternative to Dubai.
Everything is high-end here: a Ferrari Formula One sports stadium complex with the
world's fastest roller coaster; Arabian stallions at the Abu Dhabi equestrian club; a modern
palace of marble and gold, with gardens as large as New York's Central Park, became the
Emirates Palace Hotel and includes an ATM machine that dispenses gold ingots; and, fi-
nally, an entire separate tourist island for branch museums of the Louvre and the Guggen-
heim that contain treasures of the world.
Those museums seemed a safe if expensive investment to affirm the elegance and
stature of Abu Dhabi and give it a boost in the competition for tourists. It was an art-world
twist on the UAE habit of importing whatever they wanted from anywhere in the world to
bring in tourists. Eminent architects were hired. Frank Gehry designed the new Guggen-
heim Museum as an exuberant pastiche of modern shapes. Jean Nouvel designed a sleek
spaceship-capped complex for the new Louvre. The two museums will be centerpieces
of the new tourist and culture center on Saadiyat Island, along with a national museum
named after Sheikh Zayed, the founder of the UAE, that will exhibit traditional Islamic art
and calligraphy and showcase the nation's history.
This sure bet turned out to be a major headache, proving the old industry adage of
tourism being a double-edged sword. Once you depend on foreign tourists, you become
vulnerable to international standards and tastes.
At first, French critics denounced the Louvre agreement as the crass sale of their na-
tion's “cultural heritage” or patrimony to an oil-rich emirate that wanted an instant mu-
seum. The French government responded that it was simply exporting French culture.
What took the French centuries to collect, catalogue, study and curate, the government of
Abu Dhabi would purchase in one contract for the cool sum of $1.3 billion. That gives the
emirate the right to use the name of the Louvre, receive loans from the Louvre's vast store
of art, special exhibits and instruction on how to manage the museum and its treasures.
The financial rewards outweighed the cultural complaints, especially after it was repor-
ted that the French were being nice to Abu Dhabi in return for the UAE's purchase of
French armaments and Airbus airplanes for its Etihad Airways.
That controversy was a small blip compared to the announcement by American artists
that they would boycott the Guggenheim arrangement to protest the treatment of workers
in the emirates. Organized by New York artists along with Human Rights Watch, more
than 1,100 international artists, curators and writers signed on to the boycott, saying they