Saatchi to rival Louvre with UAE gallery

Saatchi Online: British art collector is planning an Arabic language version of the artist networking site.

British advertising mogul and art collector Charles Saatchi is in talks to open a gallery in the United Arab Emirates as the region continues to build its cultural credentials.

Plans are likely to centre on the development of Saatchi Online, a social networking site for the art world, Saatchi said in an interview with the Financial Times. The dealer said he had turned down three Gulf offers to buy the site, but that he was in talks with three potential partners in Dubai and other areas across the region to invest in an Arabic language version.

According to Richard Crossland, chairman of ABL Consulting, which brokered UAE talks, local partners would fund a new gallery building in exchange for access to Saatchi’s collection. “Charles represents an entrepreneurial approach to contemporary art which is not universally popular but is a rather good fit with the Middle Eastern way of doing things” he told the FT.

Saatchi Online, which represents the work of more than 35,000 artists, has become one of the 300 busiest sites on the Internet in less than two years, the FT reported. A Mandarin version is already up and running. An Arabic site could promote local artists at a time when the Louvre, Guggenheim, Sotheby’s and Christies are all creating branches in the region.

Saatchi told the FT “The UAE deal with the Louvre demonstrates the extend of their move to become the artistic and cultural hub of the Middle East, and they would probably like to see the thousands of artists working in the whole region being able to use the site to display their work to a world-wide audience.”

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