Lincoln Center May Join The Trek to Abu Dhabi

Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts may join the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation and the Louvre in establishing a foothold in Abu Dhabi, according to an Abu Dhabi official who is involved in designing the planned cultural district.Abu Dhabi is “in early stages of talks with Lincoln Center, as part of the plan to attract the world’s largest and best-known names to the project,” the official, who did not wish to be identified, said in a statement released to The New York Sun. A spokeswoman for Lincoln Center declined to comment. The planned cultural district — developed by the Tourist Development & Investment Co., a corporation created by the Abu Dhabi Tourist Authority — is to occupy 670 acres on Saadiyat Island and will include four museums and a performing arts center. The Guggenheim will establish a contemporary art museum, designed by Frank Gehry. The Louvre is in final negotiations to license its name to a classical museum designed by Jean Nouvel. And, although the official did not specify, Abu Dhabi is apparently wooing Lincoln Center to fill the five theaters — two concert halls, an opera house, a theater, and an experimental theater — of the Zaha Hadid-designed performing arts center.“Music is very important in that part of the world — there is a very big tradition of concerts,” Ms. Hadid said. The performing arts center is “a very large building which has many different theaters in it,” she added. “It’s maybe like Lincoln Center in a way: not one performance space but many.”The director of the Guggenheim Foundation, Thomas Krens, has been pursuing global outposts for a decade; the family of Guggenheim museums currently includes sites in Bilbao, Venice, Berlin, and Las Vegas, as well as the original museum on Fifth Avenue in New York. Lincoln Center, on the other hand, is as firmly rooted in New York as the Louvre is in Paris. What would it mean for it to become a multinational brand?Several arts world observers said international partnerships could be an important new source of revenue and audience for arts institutions. The French government, which owns the Louvre and most French museums, has said it will receive between $800 million and $1 billion from Abu Dhabi for the loan of the Louvre’s name, collections, and expertise.“Assuming it goes to French cultural institutions, that will make a qualitative difference in the museum system in France,” a former commodities trader who has become a major patron of another French national museum, the Centre Georges Pompidou, Robert Rubin, said. “I think it’s a good move.”The president of the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Tom Healy, said international partnerships are the wave of the future for arts institutions. “There is an increasingly global culture for the arts, and to the extent that American brands — and Lincoln Center and any major museum is a brand as much as institution — can promote that brand around the world, they will raise more money and have more access,” Mr. Healy said.New York arts institutions may also find that having a presence abroad makes them more attractive to corporate sponsors. “Huge multinational corporations are citizens of the world: They may have a corporate office in London or New York, but they have interests all over,” the vice president for private-sector affairs at Americans for the Arts, Gary Steuer, said. “The larger arts organizations are already looking at how to put together multination tours, whether it’s performing arts or visual arts.”Audiences, too, are global. The Metropolitan Opera, for instance, experienced a sharp drop in its audience after the attacks of September 11, 2001, in part because of a decline in tourism. If the Metropolitan Opera were to travel to Abu Dhabi, it could potentially find a new audience that would also visit it in New York.The financial advantages are clear. But what happens to the soul of an institution when it expands its brand globally?“The art of it is to make sure these are authentic, long-term relationships and they’re not cynical,” an arts consultant, Adrian Ellis of AEA Consulting, said. “The relationships shouldn’t just be about: Can we have stuff out of your basement? They should be about long-term training, long-term loans, curatorial exchanges, and teaching these institutions how to manage themselves.” Of the news that Abu Dhabi is also in talks with Yale University about starting an arts school, Mr. Ellis said, “That’s absolutely what should be happening.”The risk, he acknowledged, is that the push for brand names and big architectural statements gets ahead of the programmatic planning. “It requires really careful planning, and really careful planning is not only about highly expressive, iconic architecture. It’s about looking at the community in which this is going to take place, and then working out what is needed, and then the tourism strategy, and then you get to the program, and then you get to the building. The danger of some of the more massively scaled projects is, how are they going to be programmed? When you get past the press releases, what is going to give these things really a vibrant cultural identity?”

Lincoln Center May Join The Trek to Abu Dhabi

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