By Theresa Rézeau
I encountered the Eight Principles of Dubai not in a government building or a museum, but at the Mall of the Emirates.
There they were, displayed publicly amid one of the city’s great commercial spaces: eight statements about how Dubai understands itself and the future it intends to build. I photographed them, interested not only in what they said but in where I was reading them. Around me was the Dubai the world already knows: architecture, international brands, commerce, movement and ambition. Yet the words in front of me spoke about something less immediately visible: law, economic diversification, talent and responsibility towards future generations.
As someone who has spent much of my life looking at art, I began to read them differently. I wondered what kind of culture might grow from principles like these.
The Eight Principles were shared by Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Vice President and Prime Minister of the United Arab Emirates and Ruler of Dubai, on 5 January 2019, marking the completion of fifty years of his service. They describe principles upon which Dubai had been founded and governed: the Union as the foundation; equality before the law; Dubai as a business capital; growth driven by government, the private sector and public enterprises; the distinctive character of society; economic diversification; the attraction of talent; and responsibility towards future generations.
They were not written as a manifesto for art. Yet several of them describe conditions that have accompanied cultural flourishing throughout history.
Art can emerge almost anywhere. Artists have created extraordinary work amid poverty, war, exile, censorship and political instability, and some of humanity’s most enduring images were made under precisely such circumstances. There is therefore no simple formula in which prosperity produces culture.
An artistic ecosystem, however, requires more than individual genius. Artists need places to work, audiences willing to look, systems through which objects can circulate, institutions capable of preserving them and, frequently, patrons prepared to support work before its significance is known. Governance cannot determine what artists will create, but it can shape some of the conditions in which they create it.
Four of the principles displayed before me seemed particularly relevant to this question: no one is above the law; Dubai is a business capital; the city seeks to attract talent; and it carries a responsibility towards future generations.
At first glance, the principle that no one stands above the law may appear the least artistic. Yet the art world depends profoundly upon trust. Artists, collectors, galleries, auction houses, museums and foundations operate through contracts, ownership, copyright, provenance and ethical accountability. Questions about authenticity and restitution can determine whether an object can be sold, exhibited or even legally possessed. Artistic brilliance does not depend upon bureaucracy, but a functioning art world depends upon reliable structures.
History shows how complicated the relationship between institutions and creativity can be. Renaissance Florence did not flourish simply because wealthy bankers paid artists. Its cultural life emerged through religious commissions, guilds, civic competition, private patronage, political ambition and intellectual exchange. Money mattered, but so did the structures through which money, ideas and talent encountered one another.
This becomes particularly interesting beside another of Dubai’s principles: its understanding of itself as a business capital.
Standing before those words in the Mall of the Emirates, the relationship between commerce and culture hardly felt theoretical. I was reading a declaration of Dubai’s economic philosophy from within one of its most visible manifestations.
Art has often travelled alongside commerce. Trading cities bring strangers into contact, and while objects move between them, so do pigments, textiles, techniques, stories, symbols and ideas. Patrons acquire wealth and begin commissioning objects. Collectors create markets. Artists discover audiences beyond the places where they were born.
Amsterdam’s seventeenth-century artistic culture developed alongside extensive commercial networks. Florence’s mercantile and banking wealth supported extraordinary artistic patronage. Centuries later, New York’s growing financial power coincided with its emergence as one of the centres of the international art market.
None of these examples means that money creates great art. Wealth can produce empty spectacle as readily as cultural achievement. Concentrations of capital, patronage, institutions and exchange can, however, create environments in which artists find commissions, audiences and one another.
Dubai has increasingly been building such an environment. Art Dubai, founded in 2007, brings galleries, artists, collectors and institutions into the city while supporting commissions, education and public programming. Other initiatives, including Al Quoz Creative Zone, Sikka Art & Design Festival, Dubai Collection and public-art programmes, indicate an effort to give artistic production a more permanent position within the life of the city.
An art fair can bring the international art world into Dubai for several days, but a cultural ecosystem requires something more difficult. It needs artists who can develop over years, galleries willing to take risks, collectors prepared to encounter unfamiliar work, curators capable of building serious programmes, critics willing to question, educators who create new audiences and spaces in which experimentation does not have to produce an immediate commercial return.
This is where the principle describing Dubai as a land for talent becomes especially interesting. Of all eight statements I photographed that day, it may have the clearest relationship with the future of art.
Creative energy often intensifies when different experiences encounter one another. Paris became a destination for generations of writers and artists arriving from elsewhere. Twentieth-century New York was transformed by migration and exile as artists carrying different visual traditions entered the same cultural environment. The histories of major artistic centres are filled with people who arrived from somewhere else.
Dubai offers a contemporary version of that possibility. Its population and geography place Arab, South Asian, African, European and wider Asian cultural networks in unusually close proximity. Artists and designers living within the city may carry radically different languages, histories, religions and visual memories.
Such proximity does not automatically produce important art, but it creates the possibility of encounter. An artist formed by European modernism may engage with the visual logic of Islamic geometry. A digital artist working with artificial intelligence may turn towards Arabic calligraphy. An architect responding to the desert may work beside a designer whose visual memory was formed in Mumbai, Lagos, Beirut or Manila.
These exchanges matter because new artistic languages rarely develop in complete isolation. Artists borrow, reject, adapt and transform what they encounter.
Dubai’s relationship with the artistic inheritance of its own region therefore becomes particularly significant. The city is internationally associated with technological ambition and rapid modernisation, yet it belongs to a region whose visual traditions extend across centuries. Islamic cultures developed sophisticated languages through calligraphy, geometry, architecture, ceramics, textiles, manuscript illumination and the manipulation of light and space.
In many Islamic sacred contexts, limitations on figural representation encouraged extraordinary experimentation with the written word, pattern and proportion. Calligraphy could become image, while geometry could suggest an order extending beyond the visible world. Architecture could manipulate light until physical space appeared almost immaterial.
Modernity does not require the abandonment of that inheritance. The more interesting cultural possibilities may emerge when artists decide what to do with it. Ancient approaches to calligraphy can enter digital space. Geometric traditions can encounter immersive technologies. Artists raised between several cultures can refuse the expectation that heritage and experimentation must exist on opposite sides of an argument.
These outcomes cannot be prescribed by policy. Cultural infrastructure can provide the circumstances for encounters to occur, but the artists themselves determine what those encounters become.
The real measure of a creative district is therefore what happens after artists enter it: whether they are able to experiment, challenge one another and produce work that the institutions responsible for creating the environment could not have predicted.
That unpredictability matters because culture develops through disagreement as well as consensus, failure as well as success. Some work disappears almost immediately. Some becomes fashionable and then vanishes. A small amount survives long enough to become part of how an era understands itself.
For a city accustomed to extraordinary speed, art introduces another rhythm because artistic traditions take time to acquire depth. A building may rise within years; a cultural inheritance can require generations.
That leads to the final principle that stayed with me: responsibility towards future generations.
Art makes that idea tangible in a way few other human activities can. A manuscript created a thousand years ago can still be opened. A painting can preserve the face of someone whose language, clothing and political world have disappeared. Buildings outlive their architects, while sculptures can survive the rulers who commissioned them. The people who created these objects eventually disappear, but the objects can remain, carrying traces of lives and worlds that no longer exist.
When governments and communities invest in museums, archives, collections, public art and cultural education, they are therefore doing more than creating attractions for the present. They are deciding what evidence of their world might remain available to people who have not yet been born.
This is where art differs fundamentally from many measures of prosperity. Economic rankings change, industries rise and decline, and technologies that once appeared revolutionary become obsolete. Even skylines are eventually altered. Art, however, can preserve something of the human experience that produced them.
In my own work exploring how art responds to spiritual questions, conflict and cultural transformation across centuries, I repeatedly encounter this strange endurance. Objects survive their original circumstances and become witnesses to worlds that no longer exist.
That is why Dubai’s cultural ambitions interest me. The city already possesses one of the most recognisable skylines in the world, and its architecture announces engineering, capital and ambition with extraordinary confidence. Architecture alone, however, cannot tell us what it feels like to inhabit a society changing at such speed. Artists can record dimensions of that experience that buildings and statistics cannot.
For them, contemporary Dubai contains extraordinary material. Experiences of migration and belonging unfold alongside the coexistence of faith and technology, immense wealth and less visible forms of labour. Memories are carried from other countries while ideas of home and elsewhere are continually renegotiated within a city whose physical and social landscape has changed at remarkable speed.
The artists who respond to those experiences may ultimately tell us more about Dubai’s cultural significance than any strategy document can.
I return to the photograph I took at the Mall of the Emirates and look more closely at what it contains. The Eight Principles occupy the foreground, but around them is the environment in which I encountered them: a city shaped by movement, commerce, ambition and extraordinary speed. What began as a photograph of a public statement has become, for me, an image of the relationship between the structures a city creates and the culture that may eventually emerge from them.
Law can create trust. Commerce can provide resources and circulation. A city open to talent can bring radically different imaginations into contact. Thinking in generations can encourage institutions to preserve what the present creates. None of these conditions guarantees great art, because artistic significance cannot be legislated in advance.
Governments can build cultural infrastructure. Artists determine what it ultimately means.
