Dubai is much reviled as the Planet’s largest building site (the amount of cranes per capita manned by cheap South-East Asian migrant labour in this Emirate is dazzling); an emerging dreamworld of conspicuous consumption (this is mall and luxury resort city), and an expat haven for every possible vice (Dubai is sometimes referred to as the“Bangkok of the Middle East”). But viewing Dubai in these terms is somewhat reductive, though my efforts of trying to see what goes on behind the shiny varnish – apart from awful labour conditions for the migrant labour force, the building frenzy and well…more varnish - have of yet still gone unanswered. Dubai is named by many the capital of capital and recently it has been trying its stint at art and the art market by playing host to the first contemporary art fair in the Gulf: Art Dubai. With its second edition held this year at the luxurious Madinat Jumeira complex (close to the 7 star hotel Burj el Arab), it featured over 150 international galleries, and this year the regional representation was somewhat larger than during its first edition in 2007.

In general art fairs are not my shtick, as I am firmly positioned within the non-commercial side of the art world. My proletarian art worker colleagues and I – artists and curators alike – are happy when we can wrench out a meager pay for our work. So art fairs with their glimmer and glitz, with their dealers and collectors, and sums of a few good zeros going over the counter, always seem completely alien to me. Place that within the context of Dubai, and its feverish competition with its sister Emirate Abu Dhabi (Louvre and Guggenheim in the desert anyone?), and you’re in for quite a spectacle, ranging form the latest summer fashion (complete with a stiletto heels parade) to free flowing champagne (Veuve Clicquot graciously sponsored…of course). The scale and grandeur of things were impressive to start with. For example, the entrance of the Fair was graced by Belgian conceptual artist Wim Delvoye’s specially commissioned “Cement Truck” (2008), an amazing lifesize cement truck, within his series of Gothic Machinery, made out of laser-cut COR-TEN steel, perforated with Gothic filigree. The object by itself was impressive as only Delvoye can be impressive: lush, alienating, beautifully perverse. Pity it got lost within its surroundings, which were equally lush, alienating, and beautifully perverse. Delvoye’s piece unfortunately got reduced to an ornamental scribble in the margins, which tells you a lot about the context it was shown in.

This being said, I cannot deny that I had a most brilliant time (who wouldn’t with that amount of bubbly in their blood), did some excellent networking, and the series of debates and talks under the Global Art Forum banner were not bad at all. Yet all this varnish functions a bit as the return of the repressed and will eventually come back to haunt you. One of the most absurd stories of the Fair was the disappearance of Egyptian artist’s Tarek Zaki’s Monument X. Shipped from Cairo to Dubai, the piece literally got lost at sea, and never arrived to Dubai. If there’s an art Bermuda triangle then Zaki’s piece seemed to have become the victim of it: noone could trace what actually had happened to the work. Funnily enough Zaki’s piece is all about the deconstruction of the monument as such – as art object, and as a symbol of a political and historic momentum. Its utter disappearance is in and by itself a performative act indicating a vanishing of the monumental idea in our time an age: the idea of sculptural and historical fixature simultaneously becomes archaic obsessions, as they become semantically more irrelevant. William Wells, director of the Townhouse Gallery in Cairo, and Zaki’s Egyptian gallerist, joked that a hundred years from now archeologists will find Zaki’s piece resting somewhere on the seabed, and conjure up all kinds of stories about its respective civilization. In addition, faced with the loss of his piece, Zaki decided to make a site-specific work for the duration of the fair, modeled on Monument X, and to be placed at the entrance of Madinat Jumeira. Yet the workers who were supposed to aid him never showed up, leaving Zaki with his materials, and an unfinished piece, which was supposed to substitute a lost one. In effect, this serial narrative of failure and loss couldn’t be a better postmodern illustration of Zaki’s original work: it appears that dealing with the monumental in Dubai in a critical and situated fashion, is of yet still an impossibility.