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Ségalot-Qatar Connection Propping Up the Art Market

July 6, 2011 by Marion Maneker

The Art Newspaper claims that Qatar is the single most important buyer in the Contemporary art market. “The small but energy-rich Gulf state of Qatar is the world’s biggest buyer in the art market—by value, at any rate,” says a story by Georgina Adam and Charlotte Burns. “And is behind most of the major modern and contemporary art deals over the past six years.”

More than that, the dealer Qatar uses most is former Christie’s Contemporary expert Philippe Ségalot who was responsible for brokering deals like the Sonnabend estate and the much-debated $63.4m purchase of Warhol’s The Men In Her Life during Ségalot’s Carte Blanche sale at Phillips de Pury.

According to The Art Newspaper’s calculations Qatar has spent more than $500 million on contemporary art during the boom years. If their guesses are correct that figure could be much closer to $1 billion.

Qatar Revealed As World’s Biggest Contemporary Art Buyer (The Art Newspaper)

Why Arab Modernism Is So Hard to Come By

January 4, 2011 by Marion Maneker

The Economist has a story about Qatar’s new Mathaf but in the process it offers this brief explanation of just why it is so hard to see works of Arab Modern art–and why they’re so valued when they come up for auction:

Modernist art for public display in the Middle East has long been something of a paradox. Painting is not part of the Arab tradition and museums are a Western invention. Arab art from the 19th and early 20th centuries has a very European feel. A small artistic elite studied in the beaux arts schools in France and Italy and then spent their lives mostly teaching—and painting camels and donkeys, markets and peasants in an accomplished if often undistinguished manner. The chief value of these paintings today is as a record of a way of life that has long gone.

From the interwar period a number of schools sprang up in Baghdad, Beirut, Cairo, Damascus and Tunis. Artists were trying to make sense of modernity, the end of colonialism and the struggle for independence, but the work they produced was often derivative and the collections in which it was shown patchy or transient.Continue Reading

Qatar's Mathaf Stands Up for Art

December 10, 2010 by Marion Maneker

CNN makes hay from a small portion of this interview with

The Mathaf Arab Museum of Modern Art, founded by powerful Qatari art patron Sheikh Hassan bin Mohamed bin Ali Al-Thani, is slated to open in Qatar’s capital, Doha, just before the new year.Continue Reading

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