In January 2022, Art Basel shocked the fairgoing masses by announcing that it would open a new fair in Paris in October, taking over the spot at the Grand Palais held for nearly 50 years by the Foire Internationale d’Art Contemporain, the crown jewel of the French art market, regularly attended by French presidents and dignitaries. By the time Art Basel Paris opened its third edition last year, as the city was still basking in the world’s attention from the Olympics, FIAC was little more than a faint memory. Art Basel Paris had brought the world’s galleries and collectors to the City of Light, and Paris responded in a big way. It was a week of art-world madness, with openings at the private museums founded by billionaires, big shows at the Parisian outposts of Hauser & Wirth, David Zwirner, and Gagosian, and big-ticket museum galas. Suffice to say, the expansion was a success.
Now Art Basel is expanding again. On Tuesday, the fair group announced that it would be the first international art-fair group to open an edition in the Middle East. Four years after it hosted the World Cup, Doha will welcome the world’s galleries and collectors at the first Art Basel Qatar, set to open in February 2026 at M7, a cultural center in the center of the city’s walkable design district. Though it will start with just 50 galleries, the aim is to grow to 200 exhibitors as the fair settles in.
“Growing the global art market, supporting artists and galleries, and developing new collecting audiences is core to Art Basel’s mission,” Noah Horowitz, Art Basel’s CEO, said in a statement. “Qatar’s depth of collections, history of building great cultural institutions, and unique role as an incubator and supporter of talent position the new Art Basel Qatar for success on the world stage.”
The timing of the announcement is pretty spot on…perhaps you’ve noticed that Qatar’s been in the news a bit recently. President Donald Trump arrived in Qatar last week—the first time an American president has ever made a visit to to the country—for a triumphant, over-the-top state dinner hosted by Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani at Lusail Palace. There was a sword dance; there were appearances by Piers Morgan, Elon Musk, and Bret Baier; and there was a surprise performance by Lee Greenwood, whom the emir flew out for the occasion.
The Qataris pledged to buy, per the White House, $96 billion worth of planes from Boeing, but that wasn’t the bit of plane-related news that raised eyebrows. Qatar announced that the country would be gifting a free luxury jumbo jet to President Trump for his use as Air Force One, and then for his presidential library after he leaves office. Even though several members of his own party decried this as obvious bribery, Trump said it would be “stupid” to turn down the gift. His Treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, compared it to France giving us the Statue of Liberty, which is a public artwork, not a private plane. By Wednesday, the Pentagon gave the gift, valued at $400 million, the full go-ahead.
Art Basel didn’t get a jet, though a release noted that the art will be launched “in partnership with” Qatar Sports Investments, a state-backed entity that owns the Paris Saint-Germain soccer team and part of the Washington Wizards NBA team. It’s unclear what, financially, that partnership entails.
What is clear is the importance of Sheikha Al Mayassa Bint Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani, the daughter of the country’s former emir and the sister of the current one, who’s spent her entire career building up Qatar’s gobsmacking art collection, and building starchitect-designed buildings to house it. In 2010, she moved back to Doha after getting her degree at Duke University and then doing postgraduate work at Columbia, and was named the head of Qatar Museums, a government agency.
The royal family had been amassing a trove of art, design objects, and artifacts for years. Her father started Qatar Museums, then known as the Qatar Museums Authority, as emir. Her cousin Sheik Saud went on a $1.5 billion buying spree. In the 1990s, as the country started amassing a fortune from discovered deposits of oil and natural gas, the emir convinced I.M. Pei to come out of retirement to build the Museum of Islamic Art on a man-made island off the Doha Corniche.
But Qatar’s most robust engagement with contemporary art began with Sheikha Al Mayassa. She immediately brought in big shows by Takashi Murakami and Damien Hirst and hired two big guns from Christie’s, Edward Dolman and Jean-Paul Engelen, to run her office and the public art program, respectively. By 2012, she could host a dinner and count on Larry Gagosian to show up, and in 2013 David Zwirner, Jeffrey Deitch, collector Aby Rosen, and Tate director Nicholas Serota were all in town during an October visit. She wears custom Off-White designed for her by Virgil Abloh, who installed his show in Doha just weeks before his death of cancer in 2021. In advance of the World Cup, she finished a massive “outdoor museum” that spread through the city and included large-scale works by Bruce Nauman, Isa Genzken, Katharina Fritsch, KAWS, Rashid Johnson, Franz West, and Ugo Rondinone. There is one of the 33-foot-tall Louise Bourgeois spider sculptures installed by the convention center, and Richard Serra’s 7—at 80-foot tall, it is the highest artwork Serra ever made.
But while Qatar Museums’ history of buying and commissioning artworks is staggering, public art alone cannot make a perfect city for an art fair. What made Paris such a ripe locale for an international art expo is the centuries of institutional support, and the robust gallery network of established homegrown spots and outposts of global megagalleries. In recent years, Paris has seen Christie’s and Sotheby’s invest serious funds to refurbish their French auction headquarters and stage major sales there. In the Middle East, Sotheby’s just held its first sale at the headquarters it built in Riyadh, not Doha. There’s not really a gallery network in Doha at all—Mayassa told The New York Times this week that the city has “five or six commercial galleries,” compared to the hundreds in New York’s Chelsea or London’s Mayfair.
That insane collection the government spent billions of dollars on? It includes Paul Cézanne’s The Card Players, which Qatar Museums bought for $250 million, and Paul Gauguin’s When Will We Marry? for $210 million. But neither work has been on view since they were purchased more than a decade ago. Presumably they will be part of the permanent hang at the Art Mill Museum, a massive project designed by Pritzker Prize–winning starchitect Alejandro Aravena that will occupy 64 former grain silos and exhibit work from 1850 to the present. But it’s not set to be ready until 2030, just in time for the fifth edition of Art Basel Qatar.
