Explainer: Making Sense of Art Basel's New Qatar Fair

Business of Fashion

21-05-2025

Art Basel, the world's largest organiser of art fairs, is bound for the enormously wealthy Gulf region with a new annual art event in the Qatari capital of Doha set to launch in February 2026, Art Basel and its Swiss parent company MCH Group announced Tuesday.
Dubbed Art Basel Qatar, the new event expands Art Basel's line of prestigious annual art fairs to five. The firm's flagship fair, founded in its namesake Swiss city in 1970, established the blueprint for subsequent Art Basel fairs in Miami Beach (launched 2002), Hong Kong (2013) and Paris (2022).
Art Basel Qatar is the product of a three-way partnership between Art Basel, Qatar Sports Investments and QC+, a Doha-based 'strategic and creative collective' that plays 'a pivotal role in developing Qatar's cultural infrastructure,' according to a statement. The terms of the transaction were undisclosed.
The deal triggers an avalanche of questions on the implications for Art Basel, Qatar and the wider art industry, desperately in search of growth opportunities after more than two years of shrinking sales. How surprising is this deal?
At least seven out of ten. The art world has long seen the wealthy Gulf region as a prime market for expansion, but until now the relatively minor Art Dubai was the region's most prominent art fair. Rumors had sprung up in the second half of 2024 that Art Basel was in talks with Abu Dhabi to take over the commercially slight fair Abu Dhabi Art in exchange for a multimillion-dollar capital injection. But after several months passed without word of a deal, the industry moved on, assuming negotiations had run aground.
Instead, it seems Art Basel's ambitions in the Middle East simply took a one-hour flight to Doha. The inaugural edition of the new fair will take place in the M7 creative hub and Doha Design District in the city's Msheireb Downtown quarter.
The small scale of Art Basel Qatar, at least initially, adds to the intrigue. The first edition of the fair will feature only around 50 galleries specialising in modern and contemporary art, with the selections to be overseen by a still-to-be-announced artistic director. That would make the fair's inaugural outing around one-sixth the size of Art Basel's flagship event, which typically hosts around 300 exhibitors.
The eventual plan is for Art Basel Qatar to reach the same scale as Art Basel Paris's approximately 200 galleries, according to a report in Artnet. Experts agree that it would be difficult for the new fair to be financially sustainable before then without a healthy subsidy from the Qatari government. Why would Art Basel choose Qatar?
A significant new revenue stream and a foothold in the Middle East through a partner with sterling art world credentials and minimal political complications — at least relative to the other options in the Gulf.
Under Her Excellency Sheikha Al Mayassa Bint Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani, the chairperson of Qatar Museums since 2006 (and the sister of the emir), Qatar has been collecting and commissioning art at a world-class level for nearly two decades. It has previously been reported that the Qatar Museums had an annual budget of around $1 billion for art acquisitions. For comparison, the Museum of Modern Art spent less than $26 million adding to its collection in 2022-23.
Although much of the actual transacting has been done through Western advisers, beginning with the dealers Philippe Ségalot and Franck Giraud in the noughties, Sheikha Al Mayassa has been a near-constant presence on the global art circuit. In the process she has burnished her reputation as a true connoisseur as well as a cosmopolitan on matters of taste and censorship. (Qatar Museums has organised several exhibitions of work by women artists over the years, for instance.)
Qatar has also funneled billions more dollars into new museums and arts and culture infrastructure over this span. The past 19 years have already seen the country open three major institutions centred on regional art and history: the Mathaf, the Museum of Islamic Art and most recently the Jean Nouvel-designed National Museum of Qatar.
More are on the way. The forthcoming Lusail Museum is designed to be the world's largest for Orientalist art, manuscripts and applied arts, and the Art Mill Museum, an 80,000-square-metre institution for international art made from 1850 to the present, is due to open in 2030. The latter is expected to (finally) showcase the multibillion-dollar trove of global art Qatar Museums has been assembling since the Sheikha took the helm. What's in it for Qatar?
As the Gulf nations have sought to soften their image and expand their economies beyond fossil fuels, a heated competition has erupted in the region over dominance in art, entertainment, sports and culture. A partnership with Art Basel could give Qatar the upper hand in establishing itself as the Arab world's nexus for the high-end international art trade.
This is far from a given despite Qatar's enormous spending on artwork over the past two decades. Although Abu Dhabi has inked co-operative deals with a slew of renowned Western art institutions, including the Louvre, the Guggenheim and the British Museum, the strongest scene for the art business in the Middle East currently belongs to Dubai, where more than 30 local and international dealers operate bricks-and-mortar locations and both Christie's and Sotheby's maintain offices. In comparison, the Sheikha told The New York Times that Qatar has 'five or six commercial galleries.' Not surprisingly, the most prominent art fair in the region is also generally understood to be Art Dubai, whose most recent edition welcomed such recognisable Western galleries as Perrotin, Bortolami and Almine Rech.
Yet none of those galleries operate at the uppermost echelons of the trade. The brand equity of Art Basel could be enough to lure an even higher level of international dealers, including the mega-galleries Gagosian, Hauser & Wirth, David Zwirner and Pace, to the region. All of which could supercharge any effort on Qatar's part to grow an organic, self-sustaining art market with global appeal.
If nothing else, Art Basel Qatar steals away the recent momentum of Saudi Arabia within the trade. Christie's announced in September 2024 that it had secured a commercial licence there, and in February, Sotheby's staged its first cross-category auction of art and collectibles in Riyadh. What are the biggest questions about the deal?
One is organisational. There are now two points on the annual calendar where Art Basel will be tasked with staging two fairs within eight weeks or less. The first crunch was created by the addition of Art Basel Paris, whose dates in late October leave scant breathing room before Art Basel Miami Beach in early December. An almost equally tight turnaround now exists between Art Basel Qatar's dates in early February (ahead of Ramadan) and those of Art Basel Hong Kong in late March.
Another dilemma concerns the exhibitor list for the first Art Basel Qatar. On one hand, the 50-gallery target means the firm might have to turn away (then mend relationships with) longtime exhibitors from its other fairs. On the other hand, the Qatari fair's small scale is a tacit admission that the collector base there remains incipient (aside from Qatar Museums itself). This in turn means that high-level dealers may need to be incentivised to put forth the considerable time and effort to participate.
The structure of the deal with Qatar Sports Investments and QC+ could solve the problem. Imagine, for instance, if Art Basel could offer to waive or drastically discount the fees to rent booths at the fair — a potential savings of tens of thousands of dollars per exhibitor based on the rates at its other events. Would that be enough to motivate apex-level galleries to come to Doha? What if business-class airfare and luxury accommodations were also provided free of charge by the fair's Qatari partners? These types of concessions would be unthinkable almost anywhere else, but they could very well be in play here.
Critics will undoubtedly express concerns about Qatar's stance on human rights. When the nation won the rights to host the World Cup in 2022, the attention shone a spotlight on alleged labour abuse, a paternalistic system restricting women's rights and intolerance for same-sex relationships and non-normative gender identities. To what extent these issues trouble those who tend to exhibit or buy work at major art fairs remains to be seen. The whiff of controversy may put off potential corporate sponsors, but this seems unlikely given the long list of top multinational brands that signed on to support the World Cup in Qatar three years ago. Besides, Art Basel's Qatari payout may well be enough to render corporate sponsorship deals unnecessary. What are the broader implications for the art industry?
Art Basel Qatar is, first and foremost, an acknowledgment that the Gulf is the last high-potential growth market for the international art industry. Nowhere else in the world offers as high a concentration of wealth and as light a pre-existing footprint in the trade. The top-down, state-backed push to rebrand the Gulf states using art and culture probably creates the most lucrative opportunity international art sellers have seen since Chinese collectors began buying Western art in earnest around 20 years ago.
The new fair is also the latest evidence that the global art-fair audience is fragmenting. It used to be that the same relatively diverse group of collectors, dealers, institutional professionals and intermediaries more or less traveled together along the same continent-hopping itinerary throughout the year. More recently, however, fewer Americans are making the trip to Hong Kong every year, fewer Asians are coming to Miami and even many Europeans are choosing either Switzerland or Paris, not both.
It's debatable how much of this fragmentation has to do with larger sociopolitical forces, a still-volatile global economy and the magnitude of the annual art calendar. But the logistical frictions created by Art Basel's newest fair, even within its own internal universe of responsibilities, suggests the organisation understands that its different events increasingly serve different constituencies.
Art Basel Qatar is designed to reach past the Gulf itself. But its attraction beyond East Asia, Southeast Asia and Africa is probably limited. Similar concentric rings of interest can be drawn around not only every other Art Basel event but also every art fair from every other organiser as well.
Truly global appeal may be something that almost no yearly event in the art industry can muster anymore. Art Basel may not be the first to recognise as much, but it is certainly early in acting on it in this region. The main question going forward is how much groundwork the company and its partners will need to lay before a critical mass of dealers, tastemakers and collectors will follow.