Christie’s is stepping up its efforts to cultivate the global market for modern and contemporary Middle Eastern art with a major exhibition of art from the Arab world taking over its London headquarters this summer, ahead of the return of the category’s evening sale in the U.K. capital this fall.

On the heels of successful sales of works by artists from the Arab region in recent auctions in London and New York, the exhibition “Modern and Contemporary Art of the Arab World”—billed as one of the largest of its kind in London—brings together more than 150 works spanning from 1939 to 2023 across different mediums. It aims to not only broaden the audience base, but also to rectify some preconceptions and misunderstandings of the Arab art world by showcasing its diversity and history.

“There are often preconceptions about art from the Arab world that have been shaped by a number of factors. These include somewhat limited exposure to the works on an international platform, along with misconceptions as to the nature of the works themselves,” Ridha Moumni, Christie’s deputy chairman for the Middle East and North Africa, told Artnet News. Moumni, a historian of art and archaeology, curated the exhibition; he conducted research at Harvard University’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies before joining Christie’s in 2021.

Inji Efflatoun, Dreams of the Detainee (1961), featured in “Kawkaba: Highlights from the Barjeel Art Foundation.” © Image courtesy of Barjeel Art Foundation.

Moumni cited factors including a focus on Eurocentric narratives in the art market, and a perception of underrepresentation of artists and works of art from the Arab world outside of the Middle East and wider Arab diaspora, despite the fact that notable works are already on display in major institutions and galleries in the west.

“This may have perpetuated the notion that Arab art is limited to specific themes and reflective of social stereotypes, especially around female artistic freedom,” he explained.

But by staging the exhibition in London, in partnership with the UAE Ministry of Culture and Youth and the Barjeel Art Foundation, Christie’s hopes to grab the attention of a global audience in the U.K. capital throughout the summer. The show is open to the public at the house’s King Street headquarters, free of charge, through August 23.

The show also addresses a few of these misconceptions. The exhibition is divided into two sections. “Kawkaba: Highlights from the Barjeel Art Foundation” is on loan from the private collection created in 2010 by Sultan Sooud Al-Qassemi. Moumni said this gender-balanced exhibition shines a spotlight on leading Arab female artists, including Etel Adnan, Huguette Caland, and Inji Efflatoun, while also showcasing artists from different geographies, backgrounds, and religions, as well as works reflecting the turbulent times some of the artists lived through.

Ibrahim El-Salahi, The Last Sound (1964), featured in “Kawkaba: Highlights from the Barjeel Art Foundation.” © Image courtesy of Barjeel Art Foundation.

The second part is a selling and loan exhibition focused on the Emirati artist Hassan Sharif, who introduced conceptual art to the region. While many have thought that Arab artists were inspired by the west—and indeed, many Arab artists were exposed to western art—”they reflected the reality of their own region in their work,” Moumni noted. “They also created modern artworks inspired by local, pre-Islamic, Islamic, and Ottoman heritage using innovative techniques.”

In terms of market, modern and contemporary Middle Eastern art is already an established collecting category, and Christie’s brought this category to London, hosting its first standalone evening sale in 2017, after 11 years of sales in Dubai. The audience for this category has been quietly expanding. “We’ve seen new institutions, existing and new collectors buying in our dedicated Middle Eastern art sales,” Moumni said, adding that the category has also been drawing attention from enthusiasts outside the region.

Evening sales of this category in London started off with a bang in 2017, but the sale total gradually declined during the pandemic, with only online sales held in 2020 and 2021. Last November, the live evening sale resumed with an online component. With a total of 26 lots on offer (with three withdrawn and five unsold), the live evening sale achieved a total of £2.2 million ($2.8 million)—a solid result compared with the previous online sales, considering the modest scale.

Hassan Sharif, Cloth 2 (2013). Courtesy of Christie’s.

Despite the market correction experienced during the first half of 2023, hopes for Middle Eastern art remain high. At Christie’s 20th/21st-century evening sale in London in June, the 1979-born Ahmed Mater achieved an auction record in his evening sale debut with the house. The photographic print Magnetism (Triptych) (2021), sold for $238,787 with fees, more than three times the fee-free low estimate. In the auction house’s New York sales in May, Etel Adnan’s California (2003) fetched $352,800 including fees, more than five times the low estimate (which did not include fees). It too was the artist’s first 20/21 evening sale with the house, and the painting achieved the third-highest price for the late artist’s work at auction. Another Adnan painting sold at Christie’s London June evening sale for a price well above the presale estimates.

The date and number of lots on offer in Christie’s November sale are yet to be confirmed, but “we are anticipating one of our strongest modern and contemporary Middle Eastern art evening sales, with a number of high-quality works already consigned,” said Moumni.

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Every week, Artnet News brings you The Gray Market. The column decodes important stories from the previous week—and offers unparalleled insight into the inner workings of the art industry in the process.

This week, caught in the middle…

An Ocean Between Us

Despite sharp differences of opinion, opponents in the debate about how artificial intelligence might reshape the making and marketing of artwork in the years ahead typically share a core assumption: that people using the technology will be governed by basically the same rules no matter where they are. However, this core assumption is coming untethered from reality due to the starkly contrasting actions taken by U.S. and E.U. regulators this summer. It’s only by taking stock of this divergence that artists, institutions, and other cultural stakeholders can begin to grasp how messy, regionally contingent, and beyond their control A.I.’s effects on art are likely to be.

The allegedly big stateside news about A.I. regulation arrived last Friday. In a meeting with President Joe Biden, executives from seven companies at the vanguard of A.I. development (Amazon, Anthropic, Google, Inflection, Meta, Microsoft, and OpenAI) formally agreed to self-police their algorithms using shared guidelines. The tentpole commitments include subjecting their A.I. products to rigorous safety checks before releasing them to the public; inviting third-party experts to investigate their A.I. products for weaknesses exploitable by black-hat hackers; and embedding watermarks into all content generated by their A.I. products so that the public clearly understands its origins. 

Optimists might say that these American tech giants are wise to get ahead of Congress, which has been ramping up its interest in using the law to rein in A.I. Sue Halpern of the New Yorker noted that three different bipartisan bills targeting three different risks of the tech were introduced in the House of Representatives in June. The first would require government agencies to disclose to users any time A.I. is being used in their communications, as well as to create an appeals process for A.I.-influenced decisions. The second would punish social media platforms for disseminating toxic content produced with A.I. tools. The third would create a bipartisan commission to lead the charge on further regulation of generative A.I. 

Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer has also proposed convening a series of expert panels to give him and his colleagues what Halpern calls “a crash course” in artificial intelligence so that they can proceed intelligently on tech policy for a change. (The U.S.’s top legislators did not exactly swaddle themselves in glory during, say, the Facebook hearings in 2018, or the TikTok hearings earlier this year.)

Members of the European Parliament vote on the Artificial Intelligence Act during a plenary session in Strasbourg, France, on June 14, 2023. (Photo by FREDERICK FLORIN / AFP) (Photo by FREDERICK FLORIN/AFP via Getty Images)

But in the race to prevent artificial intelligence from running amok within its home nation, Congress is being lapped by its counterpart in the E.U. Also in June, the European Parliament approved a draft version of the A.I. Act, the latest checkpoint on a more than two-year journey to establish a rugged, far-reaching set of rules to guard against the technology’s scariest possibilities. Unless it is defanged during this final stage—an outcome that is all but unthinkable, it seems—the law is poised to require A.I. developers to publish summaries of the copyrighted material used to train their algorithms; enact a near-total ban on the use of A.I. in facial-recognition systems; and mandate the performance of “risk assessments before putting the tech into everyday use, akin to the drug approval process,” according to the New York Times. While there are several more months of negotiating ahead, the final law could be passed before the end of the year. 

How seismic would the impact of a robust A.I. Act be? In May, Sam Altman, the cofounder and chief executive of DALL-E and ChatGPT maker OpenAI, declared that his company would “cease operating” in the European Union if it “can’t comply” with the bloc’s forthcoming laws. 

That might sound curious given that only a few days earlier Altman urged U.S. lawmakers to regulate the development and use of A.I. during a Senate subcommittee hearing, where he warned (in a quote I have seen reprinted in nearly every article I have read on this subject for two months), “If this technology goes wrong, it can go quite wrong.” But it makes perfect sense given American lawmakers’ history of essentially allowing Silicon Valley to write its own rules. The past few decades have produced a pathetically small number of elected officials willing to risk being accused of stifling innovation stateside. For Altman, then, the odds are favorable that American A.I. regulation will still be hugely deferential to him and other tech execs.

The fanfare around OpenAI and the six other companies’ commitment to self-policing reinforces why he should be confident. Halpern’s New Yorker piece does a strong job of teasing out the many soft spots in their joint pledge. There are no actual penalties waiting for companies that don’t live up to their promises, no guidelines for who the independent experts doing the proposed vulnerability checks will be—let alone how they will be chosen—and not even any uniform definitions for critical terms governing the clauses of the agreement (think: “safety,” “independent,” or “watermark”), 

In fact, the companies’ shared vow to ensure their A.I. products are safe and secure before their public release borders on comedy given that the septet was invited to the White House in the first place because they have already publicly released several major A.I. products without doing any of that. More importantly, they are clawing back exactly none of those products to run them through the safety and security gauntlet now that they’re on the market. Meta, Halpern notes, even made an open-source version of its chatbot (known as LLaMA2) available at no cost for both research and commercial use—a decision that one computer scientist said was “a bit like giving people a template to build a nuclear bomb.”

High-resolution images generated using Meta’s CM3leon A.I. image generator. Courtesy of Meta.

Degrees of Difficulty

While Altman later downplayed his comments about the prospect of pulling OpenAI out of Europe, according to the Financial Times, that he felt compelled to make those comments in the first place indicates how much more daunting the Artificial Intelligence Act is to A.I. entrepreneurs than any potential American regulations. His reaction also offers a launch point into the friction that could be awaiting an art world largely expecting universal rules to govern the technology’s use going forward. 

If the E.U.’s final legislation stays true to its current form, it is plausible that DALL-E, ChatGPT, and other leading A.I. tools either won’t be available at all to artists and art professionals in the bloc, or else they will only be available (legally, anyway) in versions with severe limitations relative to their full-fledged counterparts in the U.S. In other words, differing regulations could create a technological gulf between the near-future U.S. and E.U. art industries no less severe than the free-speech gulf between the present-day U.S. and Chinese art industries. A potential disconnect between the U.S. and E.U. is only one aspect of the larger problem, too. 

The fracturing may only worsen as other countries hammer out their own sets of A.I. guidelines informed by their own sets of national or regional priorities. For example, China’s law, which is slated to go into effect in August, will require all generative A.I. platforms available to its citizens to adhere to the state’s aggressive censorship policies. The socially conservative streaks of other up-and-coming art markets, like South Korea and Singapore, could have a lesser but non-negligible impact if their legislators choose not to mirror either E.U. or U.S. legal frameworks for the technology, as well.

Of course, these sobering possibilities for global culture hinge on artificial intelligence quickly becoming as central to creativity, business, and life as its strongest backers and most alarmist critics believe it will. I have some doubts about that outcome, as I’ve written before, partly because the E.U. started pursuing serious, thoughtful legislation years before ChatGPT et al achieved escape velocity among a broad public. (Ironically, when the bloc’s legislators began the process, the tech obsession of the day was still NFTs.) 

It’s still plausible that regional restrictions on generative A.I. tools end up as nothing more than a modest inconvenience. After all, it’s not as if China’s blockade of American-developed social media platforms has done much to hinder the Chinese art economy; some would even argue that its business practices are more technologically advanced than the West’s thanks to the 360-degree capabilities of WeChat. To use another example, GDPR created some headaches and added costs for art businesses that wanted to keep communicating with an E.U. audience after the privacy law’s implementation in May 2018, but five years later, my sense is that it’s as distant a memory for the art trade as concerns about Y2K. 

Kevin Abosch, NEVER FEAR ART (2021). Courtesy of the artist and Global Crypto Art DAO.

Lurking in the shadows of this discussion, as well, is the fact that the art establishment has its own priorities—and even in recent history, dancing along the bleeding edge of technology has tended not to be one of them. Paintings, drawings, and sculptures still make up the overwhelming majority of the art exhibited and sold around the globe every year. Sure, some of those works have some kind of digitally informed layer to them, but there’s little evidence to suggest that the trade will be kneecapped if artists around the world can’t all use DALL-E to generate images from text prompts, or if galleries and institutions across continents can’t all use ChatGPT to streamline the production of press releases or other marketing materials.

More importantly, stakeholders still primarily make their decisions about what to show, buy, and sell based on in-person meetings, phone calls, emails, and basic e-commerce—methods of consensus-building that have been around for somewhere between roughly 20 and 2.4 million years. We are still ultimately social animals seeking thrills and opportunities. So yes, regionally specific regulations of A.I. may complicate the art business in the years ahead. But where there’s a will, there’s another way.

[The New Yorker, New York Times, Financial Times]

That’s all for this week. ‘Til next time, remember: our differences really are smaller than our similarities, especially when we’re all just fodder for the algorithms anyway.

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